


The Dark Tapes

by twistedservice



Series: The Fabled [5]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, F/F, F/M, Minor Character Death, Multi, Mystery, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Past Character Death, Supernatural Elements, just some more absolute nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-12-05
Packaged: 2021-01-30 18:03:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21432427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedservice/pseuds/twistedservice
Summary: "If my time really has run out, if this is the last time, then I just want whoever hears this to know something. I spent years of my life trying to figure this place out. Trying to figure him out. Someone had to, and no one was. If tonight really is my last night, then don’t let that be for nothing. Don’t let him win. If this is it, then I have no choice to welcome it with open arms. And if not, I’ll—”What happened in the past and what happens in the future because of it.
Series: The Fabled [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1072044
Kudos: 1





	1. Listen Carefully

“Happy birthday,” Blair murmurs, so quietly she almost doesn’t hear him.

Nadir can’t see him, either. He’s pressed up against her back, cold as fuck, trying to leech the warmth out of her as always. She cranes her neck back to peer at him for only a second until she gives up, laying her head back down on the pillow.

He actually slept two nights ago, so there’s almost no chance he got a wink last night. But it’s the thought that counts. He’s still there, just behind her. She smiles, folding her hand over his where it’s pressed over her stomach, and he laces their fingers together.

It’s nice. Not November, that is. November’s when the cold comes, and when the cold comes the bad things start crawling out of the woodwork. But it’s nice to have left the literal hell that was October behind, to have some sense of normalcy again. To live in a house and a moment where the darkness was still heavy, but not for any sort of terrible reason.

It was kind of hard to escape the darkness when you slept so soundly in the basement.

“Serious question,” she asks. “Did you remember that on your own, or did Tanis have to tell you?”

He readjusts, grumbling something under his breath. He presses his face into the back of her shoulder and stays there. “Shut up.”

She laughed. When she did it felt like the darkness was a bit further away, if only for a moment.

And if that was all it took, she could handle that.

—

—

—

The more years you live without aging, the less you start to appreciate birthdays.

Birthdays to Blair meant a year closer to moving on. To packing up his shit and his life and starting over somewhere else, before someone started to catch on and question it. There were vampires everywhere. Ones that embraced it like they were royalty.

But when he had embraced it that had just meant killing to satisfy it.

Not that he’s against the killing thing. He’s certainly done it enough.

If he lived an ideal life he’d like to start slowing down on that front, though. Now that they’ve had just about an entire month of peace the idea seems like something he could actually have rather than just a figment of nothing, a hopeful delusion. He’s always done whatever he had to do to survive, but surviving seems easier now.

He hates that he feels obligated. No one here is bordering on serial killer territory except for him, even if no one else would call it that. Nadir may have been a tad too invested in the killing thing at some point in her life, fueled by grief and apathy, but that’s one thing. He was just doing it out of sheer bloodlust.

If something were to happen, he’d be the one that dealt with it. He wouldn’t ask anyone else to even lift a hand.

Now, with everyone just  _ okay _ , he’s hoping he won’t have to. If that demon decides to show its face again he’s going to rip it limb from limb, but that’s justified. No one will try and stop him. Someone might even try to beat him there.

That’s one thing. Until then he’d like to embrace the peace of things and just enjoy what he has now in comparison to what he did a few months ago. He may hate the monotony, sometimes, but it’s better than running. It’s better than not living at all.

They eat their breakfast in content silence, all nine of them. There’s hardly enough room for all of them in the kitchen but they make it work, and he ends up sitting on the counter eating a waffle with his bare hands just for the hell of it.

No one’s making a big deal out of this birthday thing, and there are two reasons for it. Nadir doesn’t seem to care about it one way or another, and no one will go out of their way to make it a thing. The other is that she keeps telling them all to shut up, sometimes kinder and sometimes worse, whenever someone goes on too long about it. When it’s been several hundred years of being alive they’re not as fun as they used to be. Blair couldn’t remember when his birthday was until a few months ago, even though Nadir remembered it as if it had happened the day before. It had passed in August without him even thinking about it, and he still didn’t care.

Dimara makes all of them pile into the car before noon even hits, something about wanting a coffee that wasn’t made by one of their disastrous hands. He reads in-between the lines with that one: she wants to see Kali, and Kali doesn’t often come up to the house, or lack thereof for anyone else, for fear of being followed. That wouldn’t look suspicious at  _ all.  _

Dimara also spent half of October purchasing an SUV that was definitely  _ not  _ along the lines of a soccer mom van, and if Nadir and Tanis take the bike the seven of them could fit into it just right. If you ignored the fact that Kelsea ended up sitting on someone half the time anyway, or that Rooke still kept up the disappearing act, it was perfect.

They spend another two minutes idling in the driveway while he kicks Celia away from the passenger seat. She’s still glowering when he finally wins, taking the seat behind his with a sour look on her face. The looks dampens some when Rory’s smile at her; Blair files that away for later blackmail.

Celia must be thinking alone the same wave-length, because she drives her foot into the back of his seat and doesn’t let up the whole way into town.

It’s a good thing he’s used to it.

—

—

—

Nadir will never  _ not  _ love the bike.

She’s had it for too long. Attachments aren’t something she had many of for several hundred years because how troublesome keeping them was.

The bike, though, that’s something else. 

They make it into town long before the car does, and she pulls up at the curb outside the coffee shop behind, expectantly, Kali’s car. She feels as if Dimara is trying to plan something for this whole birthday nonsense, and if that’s the case she won’t stop her. She’ll see how she feels when or if it happens.

Tanis unwraps her arms from Nadir’s middle and goes about fiddling with her phone while they wait for the others to catch up. Someone, although she reckons it’s Blair and not Dimara, slams down on the horn as soon as they pull up behind them, and Tanis jolts so hard she nearly takes a spill onto the sidewalk.

“I fucking hate you,” Tanis says, without even turning around to confirm who did it, but there’s no feeling behind it. Judging by Blair’s delighted face when she looks, it was him. She knew it. The sidewalk empties out alongside them so she climbs off the bike, and a few seconds later Rooke pops into view less than half a foot away.

“ _ Jesus _ ,” Tanis snaps. “You too. Quit it, would you? I told you to stop doing that.”

“Sorry,” he says sheepishly, stuffing his hands in his pockets. He at least looks bad about it; Blair still looks positively gleeful, even as he gets out of the car.

The past month has been weird - they all know that. Rooke is still re-learning how to look all of them in the eyes without hesitating, and despite her saying it’s untrue, Tanis is jumpier than she used to be. Blair, much to his credit, is acting as if everything's normal and always has been, and he’s doing a damn good job, but there’s something wrong in there. She knows it.

Blair steps forward, kicks at Tanis’ leg where she’s still sitting on the bike, and nudges Rooke so hard he stumbles into the bush at the edge of the sidewalk.

Or maybe not. 

It seems like he’s gotten more protective of the two of them, if anything. Nadir will take that over the number of bad things it could be instead.

Vance grabs a handful of Rooke’s shirt and hauls him away from the shrubbery before he can fall any further into it without blinking, as if he does it all the time. Nadir is beginning to suspect he does, when she’s not looking. Who knows what they get up to when she’s sleeping peacefully, pretending that they can get up to nothing bad of sorts.

Their coffee order is long and borderline insane. Although everyone refuses to get Kelsea anything coffee related something inevitably ends up in the order anyway, and Rooke, on his wild insistence that he won’t drink it, ends up getting someone to clear out half of the bakery counter for him in a bag practically the size of his head.

She might have something to say about that in the past, but he’s taking the initiative to do something and he doesn’t look completely terrified when he asks, so it’s good. She likes that.

Dimara conveniently finds Kali about thirty seconds off from paying for their order, and Nadir is forced to fish out her credit card to pay for something so expensive they all could’ve eaten dinner for it. Someone hands her a bag and the weight of it makes her shove it back at someone, and it’s so big that is hides Kelsea’s entire face from view when she takes it into her arms. The drink trays are even more confusing, and she has no hope of sorting them out here, so she takes two trays and pushes the other towards Blair’s waiting hand on the counter.

In the chaos he hooks a finger around her necklace and lightly tugs at it. “We’re going to go bankrupt from buying coffee,” he says, scooping up the other tray.

“Probably,” she agrees. She tries to step away from the counter but nearly gets knocked over. The offender turns out to be Rooke, but instead of apologizing and scooting out of the way he makes an awful, horrified little noise and dives behind Blair so quickly she almost misses him entirely.

He says something that she can’t make out, a jumble of words that come tumbling out so quickly she’s not sure anyone else made sense of them either. She waits, but he doesn’t reappear. She can see one of his hands white-knuckled around Blair’s side, so he hasn’t gone anywhere.

“Rooke?” she asks. The mere mention of his name, upticked into a question, has everyone else turning around to look for him as if they’re well-practiced at it. They sort of are.

Nothing happens, but something  _ is _ . Something’s wrong.

She just doesn’t know what, yet.

—

—

—

Rooke’s hands are shaking where’s he’s holding onto Blair.

Blair could force him off, but doesn’t. He’s clinging so close Blair’s genuinely worried they’re about to fuse together, or something ridiculous.

Everyone’s staring at the two of them, but mostly at Rooke. A commonly occurring thing, these days.

“You dying all over again, or something?” he asks, trying to get a good look at him, but Rooke is determined to stay hidden.

“That’s him.”

“What? Who’s who?”

“ _ Him _ ,” Rooke says again, with more emphasis, but his voice comes out in almost a chatter, as if he’s shivering. He’s always cold, so there’s no use in that. No one else can hear him besides Vance, not in this mass of people, but Vance doesn’t look any more clued into than he does.

He looks around, but no one obvious pops into view. He certainly doesn’t know anyone here, but Rooke has to with this reaction. He’s scared. Blair can feel it.

“Start describing.”

“By the counter,” Rooke says nervously. “Tall, with the dark hair—”

“Green coat?”

“Yeah.”

“Who is he?”

Rooke inhales and exhales so many times Blair’s wondering if he’s suddenly acquired the need to actually breathe. His shaking is getting worse by the second, and he’s making no move to get any further away from Blair.

“Rooke,” he prompts. “C’mon.”

“He’s the one— he, fuck, this isn’t real,” Rooke says. “It’s not—”

“ _ Who is he?” _

“The one that killed me,” he chokes. “The one that led the others to the house, he’s the one that said—”

_ He’s the last one - you’re not getting anyone else. _

Blair remembers hearing those words back when Rooke finally told him what happened, when he got the full story of him dangling from the doorway, found out where the bruises around his neck came from. And that man, somehow, is standing before him now at the counter waiting for a coffee like nothing in the world could be wrong. Vance has gone ramrod straight - he’s heard what Rooke has said, too, and can’t keep his eyes from travelling to the man across the room.

“That’s not possible,” he murmurs.

“That’s  _ him, _ ” Rooke repeats. “God, it’s him, this isn’t real.”

“It’s okay,” he says. The man steps away from the counter, drink in hand, and Rooke flinches so hard he drives himself even further into Blair’s back. He waits for Rooke to leave, but the grip on his back only gets tighter. He was alone when he died. He’s too scared to be alone now.

He leans over to grab Rory by the arm and drag him over, innocent and unsuspecting Rory, who has no clue what’s going on the same as the rest of them. He thinks Nadir may have heard too judging by the look on her face, but she’s frozen in place.

With Rory dragged up against his side there’s no chance Rooke’s going to be seen by anyone at all, let alone the man across the room. He sits down at a table along the opposite wall with his drink, newspaper in the opposite hand. At this angle Blair can see a jagged scar twisted over his left eye, as if a knife caught him and then skipped over his skin.

It’s possible. Rooke, the  _ actual  _ Rooke, isn’t a liar.

“Take him outside,” he instructs. “Just go around back. Nowhere else.”

Rory grabs Rooke by the arm without questioning the order and heads for the door. They escape scott free - the man doesn’t so much as look up from the newspaper once he’s laid it out across the table.

“What the hell is going on?” Dimara hisses. “Who is that?”

Everyone’s pinpointed by this point who they’ve picked out of the crowd. Blair takes a few steps forward at the same time Vance does, but neither of them move any further. There’s nowhere for them to go, nothing for them to do. Not in here.

“I can’t pick him out with this crowd,” Vance murmurs. Blair’s been trying, but there’s no use. There’s no picking a single person out of this mass to pinpoint who or  _ what  _ they are. If this is the truth then he’s not human, point blank. Behind them he thinks he can hear Nadir relaying the story, much to the shock and awe of the rest of the group. Blair is rotating all of the pictures through his brain on those wanted posters and finally settles on one that he vaguely remembers; they’re remarkably similar. His head can’t be trusted to make an identical connection when he spent no more than a few seconds focusing on it. He knew all along that Rooke was dead. It wasn’t a shock.

Everyone’s gone silent behind him. It’s the utter silence in such a sea of chaos that forces him to look away. Sooner or later the staring is going to get obvious, and although Rooke’s gone Blair’s not sure that poking the bear is a good idea. Not when they don’t know what the bear is.

“I’m going after them,” Nadir announces. Kelsea is right on her heels. Everyone else is on the same wavelength in refusing to stare except for Kali, who looks like she can’t take her eyes away from it.

And she doesn’t even  _ know _ , not the way any of them do.

Blair sighs. “Welcome to the fucking family,” he says, and makes way for the exit.

—

—

—

By the time Nadir rounds the back of the building Rooke’s officially proved her wrong, about just about everything.

A ghost physically cannot hyperventilate, or should not be able to, but he’s doing it. He’s hunched over on the ground next to a dumpster, head in his hands, shuddering with every inhale. Rory is crouched down next to him, speaking in hushed tones, but it doesn’t look like he’s getting through.

Kelsea barrels in whilst Nadir is stuck trying to figure out what to say, and settles down next to him to hug him tighter than her thin arms should be capable of. It’s cold enough that she’s finally wearing a coat to cover the scars on her arm.

He does look up, eventually, and his face is wet with tears. “This can’t be happening, he’s going to—”

“He’s not going to do anything,” she interrupts.

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that,” she insists. “He can’t physically hurt you, and he’s not going to touch any of us.”

“You don’t—”

“I know that,” she repeats, insistent. Desperate for him to understand it. “I know that, because we’re not going to let him.”

“She’s right,” Vance says, coming up behind her. He’s really starting to take after Blair in the whole silent when walking department, and if he keeps doing it, she's going to give him a talking to. He’s the only one that’s come any closer. Tanis looks like she’s been left to explain the ugly details to Kali while Blair, Dimara and Celia predictably argue, it seems, who’s going to beat the guy up if he so much as steps foot out of the building while they’re still here.

She looks up at him. Vance has never been one to talk that way, as if he’s going to be part of the brutal process that stops  _ anything _ , but it’s easy to flashback to last month. He changed in October and nothing bad happened. While he wasn’t overly friendly with them like the previous time he had left the house, come back six odd hours later, and changed back. There was no violence, no screaming, no terror. It was just easy.

He could do serious damage. The scars on Kelsea’s arm are evidence of it. Now that he’s in his right mind he could do it with intention, to the right people.

He could protect them the way she’s saying.

They might need it, too. This makes about as much sense as anything else that happened over the summer, which isn’t much at all.

“I can’t remember his name,” Rooke says under his breath. “I’ve spent so long trying to forget.”

He’s completely pliable when she leans down to grab him by the arm. “Let’s go. We’ll go back to the house and figure it out.”

There’s no arguing. She waits until Kelsea and Rory have herded him back to the car, watching the arguing at the mouth of the alley peter off when he passes and pick back up once he’s out of hearing range.

“What are we going to figure out, exactly?” Vance asks, looking perplexed. “He should be dead.”

“I think that stands for the both of us, too.”

He gives her a look that screams  _ fair point _ and follows the others out of the alley, climbing into the car after them without protest.

“We’re going back,” she tells the others, edging through them all in order to break up the conversation.

“We had plans,” Dimara sighs in exasperation. “You know, birth—”

“It’s fine,” she interrupts. Tanis is already waiting back on the bike. “I don’t care.”

Kali looks delighted for all of two seconds about the mention of anything birthday related before she remembers exactly where she is and what’s going on. The look fades faster than it even appeared.

Nadir waits until all of them have filed back into the car. Kali gets into her own and signals to turn around before Nadir has even gotten back on the bike - that answers that question.

The coffee shop door chimes. A raven perched on the lightpost dangling over them caws in response. She turns to look, but the gaggle coming out through the door is unfamiliar, and wades out into the street like a flood. It’s nothing that matters.

She glances through the window before she turns around into the road, but the man is gone.

They make it back to the house in record time.

—

—

—

“Give me that,” Blair instructs, waggling his hand about. Kelsea hands over the poster with some amount of reluctance, hovering nearby and stretching up on her tiptoes to get a better look.

It’s the main name on the poster, the biggest photo.

And it’s him.

“Charles Clearson,” he mutters. Way too average of a name, if you ask him. “Born in 1909 so… thirty-eight years old when he came in here and murdered Rooke?”

“Be quiet,” Dimara hisses, snapping the end of her phone charger against his leg. He steps across the room away from her.

He waves a hand around again at nothing except the living room. It’s filled with nine bodies, but that’s because Kali’s taken up residence in his favorite chair. Rooke’s nowhere to be seen. The second they got him back in here he poofed, and there wasn’t even a smoke trail left in his absence.

“I found an obituary,” Kali says. “It links to a newspaper article from 2007. Says he died of natural causes but doesn’t list any family.”

“That’s not good,” Nadir mutters.

“Why is that not good?”

They share a look. “No family probably means he outlived all of them. By at least a couple hundred years, if not more,” he answers. “Which would explain why he’s  _ not  _ dead but doesn’t explain how he still looks the same if he fooled the place into thinking he died when he was ninety-eight.”

Dimara lays her head in her hands. Blair wishes he could do the same, but he’s more wrapped up in going back to the coffee shop and scattering that guy’s limbs about the entire place.

So much for the no murdering policy, but this is different. This is  _ justified.  _

There’s still too much that doesn’t make sense. If they knew who the guy was and he stayed in the area, how did he escape prosecution for murdering someone, even back then? Judging by what Kali’s continuing to look up all of the names are associated with dead men now, pictures and familial names as lingering proof. He’s the only one left alive.

Kelsea tugs the poster back out of his hands, studying it with such an intensity it looks like it’s hurting her poor brain. He can relate to that.

There’s something to be done about this, and something _ has  _ to be. Rooke’s never going to leave the house ever again at this rate, which means almost all of this will have happened for no reason at all.

He has an idea, but he doesn’t think anyone’s going to like it. He tucks it away for later, literally and figuratively. No one else has to know. Someone, surely, will figure it out, but by then he’ll have already done it. There’s no stopping it then.

Dimara gets to her feet. It doesn’t take long for everyone to look her way.

“For my sake but mostly your own, stick as close to the house as you can for now,” she says. “We don’t go anywhere unless we absolutely have to, and we definitely don’t go anywhere alone. For all we know he only has something out for humans, but I’m not taking chances.”

She goes around the collected group, receiving nods all the way around until she gets to him. She should know by now that there’s no corralling him.

“Blair.”

“I’ll consider it,” he says. It’s the best answer she’s going to get, and everyone knows it.

Kali looks up from the constant flicking motion of her finger along her phone’s screen and edges closer to Dimara. “I know it’s a long shot, but you don’t think he had anything to do with Alex, do you?”

Dimara’s face twists into something resembling a frown, but she says nothing, answering with an eventual shrug. Kali steps back into the kitchen, devoting her attention once again to her phone and whatever it is she’s finding on it.

_ Alex?  _ he mouths at her. Dimara doesn’t look upset, per say, but deeply troubled. She follows Kali into the kitchen without further comment.

Yeah, he’s not going to ask anymore.

And he’s definitely not going to listen to her either.

—

—

—

Someone won’t stop knocking on the bathroom door.

It’s only been about thirty seconds, and it’s happening at an interval of about every five, but in Nadir’s mind, it’s way too much knocking.

Not that locking yourself in the bathroom is justified anyway, and whoever’s outside it probably just has to  _ go _ , but that’s nice. There’s another bathroom upstairs for a reason, and they’ll figure that out eventually.

They knock again. She has no idea when  _ eventually  _ is.

It’s not as if she doesn’t want to open the door, or anything. She’s just having difficulty letting go of the countertop as if her fingers are glued to it. It’s helping her ability to stand; without it, she might just be laying on the floor a lot like Blair was back in July.

She’s trying not to think about that right now, though.

She feels sick, and she knows why. It’s not another option, as easy as it would be to assume that. It’s the idea of death coming back to haunt someone the way it did her. She was murdered too, and while Rooke knows his was purposeful she doesn’t know if the same goes for her. She doesn’t  _ know  _ if he meant it or not. She’ll never know.

There’s that knock, all over again. It hasn’t even been five seconds this time. She reaches away from the counter finally to unlock the door and tug it open.

In the hall, Rooke’s go as wide as could be, hand falling back to his side. The snappish question she had on her tongue dies there.

If it was anyone else, she might have gotten it out.

“What?” she asks, hollow exhaustion tinting her tone instead of the irritation she expected. Rooke shifts back and forth on his feet, eyes flicking from the floor to her own. He looks uneasy, but she feels the same way. There’s no judgement there.

“I just wanted you to know before you found out,” he says eventually. “I told him not to.”

“What?” she repeats.

“Blair left a few minutes ago. I don’t know what he’s going to do, but I have an idea. If it helps any he said he wasn’t going to do anything  _ too  _ stupid, but I don’t know how much that’s worth when it comes to Blair.”

Blair almost never does anything stupid on purpose. He attracts those situations and holds them close and thrives in them. It doesn’t matter what he says - they happen anyway.

He’s long gone, now. A few minutes head start to him is like days. 

“The idea of him being out there alone worries me,” Rooke says. “I know he can handle himself, but one little thing and he’s—”

“Dead,” she finishes. “I know.”

That’s not going to solve anyone’s problems - that’s the one thing keeping her from jumping to the most irrational of conclusions. Blair wouldn’t go out of his way to get himself killed now. Ever, really. It’s not like he’s suicidal, though stupid is often the same thing with him. They have different paths but they both lead to the same outcomes most of the time.

“I’ll call him,” she says. “Or I’ll see if I can track him down. Thanks.”

“Just be careful, hey?”

“I know. Thanks.”

He nods, hands in his pockets, and shuffles off down the hall. Bagel trots after him as he seems to do most days now, getting in-between his legs to trip him up. It’s more endearing than she’d like to admit.

“And if you need to talk about the perils of being murdered, I get it,” she says after him. They both know he won’t, really. He’d like to talk about it as much as she ever has, which is just about never. It’s not a pretty thing to bring up.

Rooke nods again, and disappears. Bagel barks at the now-empty spot where had been standing and then looks at her, wagging his tail.

“Yeah,” she says with a sigh. “I know.”

She doesn’t.

—

—

—

Blair thinks the whole being alive for hundreds of years thing really fucks with your trust level.

Or lack thereof, really. That’s why he leaves the house alone. That, and he doesn’t want anyone else getting hurt because of this. If that’s what happens, then it happens to him and  _ just  _ him. That’s the way it always should be.

He didn’t tell anyone. It was better that way when he had no idea what to expect.

He knows what else it ties into, too. It goes back to August and the car and the absolute trust he had before his neck got snapped from the impact.

It doesn’t matter now, anyway.

Just before they had turned the corner back to the Cape he had seen the man, whoever the fuck he was now, come out of the coffee shop. He had lingered by a car alongside the curb and plucked something from the driver’s seat, but hadn’t gotten in. He had walked off down the road and hadn’t looked back.

Blair doesn’t know what to expect, but the last thing he thinks he’s going to see is the car still sitting there.

It’s the only one there.  It’s just past eleven and everything on this quaint little block is closed. Even the street lights are spaced too far apart for it to be considered a widely traversable area this late at night - Portland is safe, but not always in the dark. Even the human scent is stale - everything closed up hours ago on a Sunday and everyone has since vacated. There’s no sign that anyone has been here in the past while, and it’s been nearly twelve since they were down there.

Charles Clearson, or whatever his name was, hadn’t come back since.

It didn’t make sense, but Blair approached the car and peered in through all of the windows regardless. It was old as hell and looked as if it should have been falling apart. That was what had caught his attention in the first place.

He wiggles the handle to the back side passenger door and then pulls until the door pops out of frame. Easy enough with a car this old, and hopefully he doesn’t open this door often enough to notice that the locking mechanism has been broken from the inside out.

There’s nothing in the back, so he crawls into the front. There’s a driver’s license in the center console with an unfamiliar name and address, but the picture is definitely the same. Same scars and everything. He snaps a picture of it for later.

There are also, conveniently, several text messages on his phone from Nadir that he hasn’t looked at. He sends her a thumbs up without reading any of them; the quicker he gets out of here, the better.

She’ll understand that later, once she’s done being angry at him.

There’s not much else. There’s a few papers in the glovebox - proof of insurance and other standard things. Another ID is tucked into the back corner, with a different name. He takes a picture of that too. Behind it is a key-ring, but the lone key dangling it doesn’t fit the doors. It finally pops the trunk open when he gets out and gives it a few tries, and the whole thing creaks loud enough he expects the guy to pop out of the bushes and have a go at him.

He doesn’t know what he expects to find in the trunk - a body, maybe. There isn’t one, but he already had the image prepared. There’s a spare coat and a pair of gloves, a windshield scraper. There’s a cardboard moving box on the left side, and he pulls the lid off to reveal two massive stacks of papers and file folders. He only glances at the first one he pulls out, enough to see ‘CASE FILE’ and the name Charles alone before he shoves it back into the box and pulls the whole thing out of the trunk.

He almost misses the smaller box tucked behind it in the shadowy corners of the trunk. It’s long and narrow, filled with stacked cassette tapes. There are dozens of them, and they’re not labeled with anything besides numbers. He pulls out the one on the very top, the number twenty-seven written over a strip of masking tape. It’s barely holding on, and the number is almost completely illegible. Whatever it is, it’s old. Just about as old as the fact that someone is still using cassette tapes.

It’s a good thing he’s virtually untraceable as a living human being, because Charles Clearson is not going to be pleased upon finding out all of his shit’s been stolen.

Blair scoops up both boxes, closes the trunk, and puts the key back in the glovebox. By the time he’s walking back down the street the car looks untouched.

You know, if you don’t peek in the trunk.

He finally allows himself time to text Nadir back, properly, a single text that reads  _ be back in five _ .

Or so he hopes, anyway.

—

—

—

She gets that damn thumbs up, and waits in their room.

For one, she doesn’t lock the door. That’s progress. She even informs Rooke that he’s fine, probably, before the two of them part ways again.

Nadir waits very patiently once she gets that  _ five minutes  _ text, and nearly loses her mind when five turns into ten. She’s moved from the middle of the bed to the edge of it, and is tapping her foot so often and so loud she’s surprised Tanis hasn’t barged in from across the hall to yell at her.

At fourteen minutes, not that she’s counting, she hears footsteps from upstairs. Everyone else is tucked away for the night.

Blair stumbles in through the door at fifteen with both arms full of god knows what - two cardboard boxes of varying size and a plastic shopping bag.

“That was more than five,” she says flatly. “Do you have nothing better to do than try to give me a heart attack?”

“Sorry,” he says, but at least sounds genuinely apologetic. She waits for some amount of snark, but it doesn’t come. He drops both boxes nearly on top of her. “Had to make a detour once I realized we probably didn’t have a cassette player. I was quick, though.”

He was, she’ll give him that. He’s also superhumanly fast, so it might not be that impressive.

She nearly asks the question, but notices the tape-filled box he deposits first. There’s her answer. The other box is bigger and practically overflowing with papers. He ignores both in favor of rooting around in the plastic bag for his newly purchased cassette tape, and he tears into the packaging with enough fervor to break the thing.

“Hear me out,” he starts, which is code for  _ don’t yell at me.  _ “When he left earlier, I saw the guy come out of the shop and head to a car on the road, but he didn’t leave. I thought if I went back now I could track it, maybe, but the car was still there. I may have broken into it.”

“ _ What _ ?” she asks, but he holds up a placating hand. She swallows down the anger.

“I found this,” he says, and shows her a photo on his phone. “Two of them, but that’s the most current one. So we have a name, now. And this, too.”

He’s gesturing to the boxes, and tosses whatever poor instructions came with the cassette player over them and somewhere into their bed. They’re never going to find them, mostly likely.

“What are these, exactly?” she asks. He grabs a handful of papers off the top, but doesn’t show her any of them.

“Case files. Official ones, like shit the police would have. Or at least these ones are, I barely got into the box. If he even got half of what they had on him it would be enough to completely unravel any case they thought they had.”

Her head is spinning, or maybe detaching from her body at the shoulders. She’s not sure. Blair drops the papers in her lap, where she leaves them. He’s too busy fiddling with the cassette player, and he grabs one of the tapes out of the smaller boxes and wedges it inside.

“What is that?”

“About to find out,” Blair mutters. She reaches into the larger box and pulls out another stack of papers, this one clipped together at the top. They’re all discolored with age, and these ones are hand-written. There are dates scribbled in the margin, names that don’t mean anything to her, and pages and pages of information that she can’t even begin to make sense of. They look like that wanted poster, almost…

That’s exactly what they look like, minus the photographs.

Blair returns with her headphones dangling from one hand, cassette player in the other. He wedges one in her own ear before she can even ask and sits down in front of her, leaving it between them. She deposits the papers back in the box with careful hands.

The tape spins. The number twenty-seven on it shakes. She glances towards the rest of the stack, one to twenty-six.

There’s nothing but background noise, at first. It’s like a roaring in her ears, almost enough to consume everything else that she could possibly here. There’s a shift, an intake of breath. She barely hears it. 

“Twenty-seven,” the voice says, distinctly male. “I think this might be the last one, though. It’s just a hunch.”

Blair sticks a fingernail between his teeth and starts gnawing on it. It’s so loud she resists the urge to reach up and slap his hand down.

“Let’s just reiterate, shall we? It’s December 13th, 1972. Wednesday. We’re still up here in the Cape. It’s still cold as hell. And this is still Beckett Arvelle, in case anyone was wondering.”

“ _ What _ ?” Blair says, loud enough that she tears his hand away and slaps her hand over his mouth, but not in time to quiet it. They both turn to the door at the same time, as if waiting for Rooke to pop into existence. It’s not even something he can  _ hear _ , but her heart feels even louder. It feels like someone has to be able to hear that.

Blair’s hand curls around hers, fingers squeezing. Someone can.

He reaches forward with his other hand to press the play button once again; she doesn't even remember slamming it down in the first place.

“I’m not sure anyone’s going to listen to this,” he says. “Not anyone important, anyway. For all I know none of this is going to make it beyond tonight, but when you spend nearly thirty years doing it you have to have some hope, right? I’m going to have hope that this changes something.”

There’s no taking this back. She didn’t know the name Charles Clearson, didn’t recognize the new name on the driver’s license, but this is different. This is Beckett, of all people, and it might break Rooke for good.

“I know he’s onto me,” Beckett says. “I know he’s coming. If I’m being honest, I thought I’d be long gone by now. Thirty years - you’d think so, right? He’s finally caught on. If my time really has run out, if this is the last time, then I just want whoever hears this to know something. I spent years of my life trying to figure this place out. Trying to figure  _ him  _ out. Someone had to, and no one was. If tonight really is my last night, then don’t let that be for nothing. Don’t let him win. If this is it, then I have no choice to welcome it with open arms. And if not, I’ll—”

His voice cuts off with an abrupt take of breath that Nadir feels deep in her own chest. She’s holding onto Blair’s hand even tighter than he originally had her. The background noise intensifies and then fades out again.

She hears it, but almost doesn’t believe it. A quiet, incredulous laughter.

The horror lying underneath it is worse.

“And I was right,” Beckett says. “He’s here. So much for optimism. I’ve got maybe thirty seconds. It’s one thing to say you’re prepared and another thing to be looking at it. I’ll spare you the grisly details and get out of the car before he gets here. But before that, if someone is still here, just know that I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I couldn’t see this through until the end. If you’re listening now, it might be on you. And no matter who you are, you don't deserve that.”

There’s the sound of a car door opening, the creak as it’s pushed outward.

“I really am sorry,” Beckett says, at long last. “I am.”

The door slams again. Her chest is aching fiercely from a lack of air, and she forces herself to take a breath. There’s five, ten seconds of silence. Something that almost sounds like a distant, faraway conversation.

And then screaming.

It’s so loud she flinches. It sounds as if it’s embedded deep in the speaker itself, an impossible notion that almost seems like reality with how consuming it is. It goes on for too long. Someone shouldn’t be able to survive screaming that long, but he is, and the awful noises are eventually overtaken by a series of sickening thuds, over and over again.

All at once, the noise stops. She’s finally learned how to operate without breathing.

There’s nothing for a minute. Maybe even two. Barely a breath, not even a sound, and then the car door opens. She wishes for something that’s not true, for him to be alive, even though he’s not.

She knows he’s not.

She waits for a voice, for a signal. For anything.

There’s a click, and the tape stops.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally got around to doing this! And successfully on the approach to finishing this bad boy sometime in the next few months, so not too much longer until the end I don't think! Thanks all who read in advance and who have read in the past, I love you.
> 
> I'll be adding the next three chaps on Thursday's, most likely. The third might be a little bit wonky timing-wise but I'll get to it!


	2. Right In The Heart

Celia’s getting really good at walking into things.

She’s getting even better at walking into things she doesn’t want to walk into. She hears voices coming from the kitchen early, far earlier than they usually do. It doesn’t seem like anything should be going on.

But, lo and behold.

“What the hell are you guys doing?” she asks, leaning past the fridge.

“Nothing,” Blair answers without looking, juggling the box on his lap in order to hide it from her prying eyes. He doesn’t come close to succeeding. Nadir, at least, has the decency to look slightly guilty about something.

Dimara stays hovering over the both of them at the table, one headphone stuck in her ear, lips pursed.

“So?” Celia continues, raising an eyebrow.

“God, will I ever be allowed to sleep in in this house?” Vance asks blearily, navigating around her into the kitchen. He retrieves the jug of milk from the fridge, rubbing at his eyes and successfully somehow ignoring everything else going on.

“Don’t you dare drink out of that,” Dimara says without missing a beat - Vance gives her a look, and then very slowly reaches for a glass without breaking eye contact.

“Seriously, what the hell is that?” she questions, reaching for the box Blair’s contained in his lap. He wraps both arms around it, turning to the left so she can’t reach it without crawling over him entirely. She hasn’t worked up the energy for that just yet, but at least her effort has alerted Vance, who’s now watching with halfway interest.

“Have you listened to all of these?” Dimara asks.

“What do you think we did all night?”

“And this is the last one?”

Nadir nods. Dimara’s face is growing more and more sour by the minute, which Celia didn’t think was possible. It looked sour enough already.

“Rooke’s not up, is he?”

“He’s in his room, still,” Vance answers. “Because unlike some of us he can’t hear everything going on down here.”

“Oh, believe me, if you could hear all of this you’d be reacting very differently,” Blair says casually. Vance reaches for the free headphone with his spare hand and all three of them go to troubling lengths to keep it away from him. Dimara nearly rips the whole random contraption from Blair’s hands and flees the kitchen with it entirely.

That’s interesting. It appears they’re at an impasse.

Celia leans back against the counter to wait. Vance backs up into a similar position.

“Okay, listen,” Dimara says. “This doesn’t leave the room. Not yet.”

Fat chance of that happening. Celia plans on telling Rory the second the hour’s up, and Kelsea will wrangle it out of Vance before long. Once the two of them know it’s game over. Tanis and Rooke won’t stand a chance. No one else has said anything, though, and it doesn’t look as if anyone’s planning on it, either.

“Can I ask what it is, then?” she says finally. Vance is too busy quietly sipping away and probably wishing he was back asleep.

“They’re tapes.”

“No shit,” she says, shooting Blair a filthy look. “I’m not stupid.”

“Some days—”

She leans over him and knees him in the gut in the process, quickly scooping up the box before he can tell her not to. Something in him doesn’t want to fight her, anyway. Dimara winds the headphones around the recorder and pops the tape out, slipping it into the box alongside the others. It’s the last one, twenty-seven, and there’s just enough room at the end for it to fit in snugly.

“I know you’re going to tell Rory,” Dimara says with a pointed look. “And for the love of God at least sit with Kelsea if she’s going to listen to it, but not Rooke. And not Tanis, either. She’ll tell him the second she finds out.”

Vance eases the recorder out of her hands. “Why are you making it sound like it’s really bad?”

Celia’s starting to grow tired of bad; they’ve seen enough of it, recently. This break they’ve gotten, it’s been nice and all, but she’d prefer if it would stay that way in a more permanent solution. If not for her than for everyone else. It’s tiring going on for this long, and she knows she hasn’t gotten the worst of it. She’s never been that close to dying, never had to look it in the face.

She doesn’t want to.

She takes the recorder back, tucking the box firmly under her arm. “Dibs on first. You can have them when I’m done.”

Vance doesn’t protest, not that she thinks he would. He’s in the same boat she is, wishing for some sense of normalcy in bodies that don’t get owed that anymore. Him even more-so than her.

They’ll just have to learn how to deal with it.

—

—

—

Celia takes an infuriatingly long time.

Vance knows this because he spends every waking hour waiting for her to finish because no one else will offer up a reasonable explanation. She retreats downstairs and sits in the bathroom and generally avoids Rory the entire day while she works her way through the box.

Every time he sees her she looks more and more troubled, often times in passing in the hall with the recorder shoved under her sweater and carrying around the next tape in her pocket.

She never addresses why.

It’s nearing midnight when the door finally clatters open onto the front porch. Vance had just been about to call it quits and head to bed considering how early he was woken up this morning when he sees her passing through the living room.

Some amount of excitement is almost raised in him at the prospect of finally not being in the dark about this, but he’s stuck frozen on his phone, on the incoming texts.

It’s not that Aubrey hasn’t text him, or anything. She has a few times. Not enough. Sometimes it’s hard to answer. Sometimes he doesn’t know how to. It’s all simple, superficial, questions about how he is and how things are going. She won’t ask and he won’t tell her. Maybe she doesn’t want to know.

But this is three, in rapid succession. Celia sits down next to him on the bench and plops the box between them, looking expectant.

Can you call me? the first text reads. If you’re still getting these? If not that’s okay, it’s not an emergency. Or maybe it is? I don’t know.

The final one is just this: if I woke you up please don’t call me, I’ll feel bad.

That’s more Aubrey than anything else.

For the time being, or at least a minute or two, he ignores Celia and dials Audrey’s number, instead. Despite the speed of the messages he still doesn’t expect her to pick up so quickly, and he waits a moment to listen.

“Is something wrong?”

“No,” she answers. “I said it wasn’t an emergency.”

“Or maybe it is, though.”

“Maybe,” she agrees. “I don’t know, Pax has been saying he’s been seeing shit for weeks now, and I told him he was full of it, but I think I saw something too.”

“Like what? Why are you telling me?”

“‘Cause it was weird?”

“And I’m suddenly the supernatural encyclopedia?” he wonders.

“I don’t know!” she repeats. “You won’t tell me and you know I won’t pry! I just didn’t know who else to ask. It wasn’t human, and it had these weird reddish eyes and it was all smoky, I think. It looked like a devil or something.”

“A devil,” he says slowly. “Or a demon?”

Celia perks up, reaching for the phone as if that’s going to do any good. It won’t. He keeps the phone cradled close.

“I don’t know,” Aubrey says. “Is that what you think it is?”

“I don’t know everything, Aubrey.”

“I feel like you know more than me, though.”

“Just,” he starts, searching for a solution. “Just be careful out there. Don’t go anywhere alone. Or tell someone where you’re going and when you’ll be back, at least. There’s some weird shit happening out there, we think.”

“And what about you?”

“What about me?”

“Are you going to be okay?” she asks. “If… if you know what it is, then that’s bad. Is something bad happening?”

“I’m hoping not,” he says. “Just be careful, okay? Tell Pax that, too. I know Emmett never goes anywhere alone but tell him to keep an eye on his sister, at least.”

Demons, now. And they still don’t know what’s going on with Charles Clearson, whoever the hell that even is. He can’t be human either. There are things out there that want them dead, that have tried before.

And now there’s even more of them.

“I want you to be careful too,” Aubrey says.

“I will.”

“Now say it like you mean it.”

“I will,” he insists. “Tell me if you see any more. Don’t go near them. Just text me.”

“Okay.”

“I gotta go,” he says. Celia won’t let him stay on the phone much longer - he’s got a few seconds until she steals it outright. “Night, Aub.”

“Night—”

He tosses the phone down onto the bench, watches the call hang on for a moment, and then ends it. Maybe she was expecting more - it feels like everyone is, these days. 

Celia hums. “Do we have an infestation on our hands? I hope I don’t get possessed too. That would be fucking dark.”

“Please don’t.”

“Sorry,” she replies, not sounding sorry at all. She waves the recorder at him until he takes it, unraveling the headphones. He expects her to leave at that now that she’s handed it over, or at least let him be while he starts on the mystery.

She doesn’t leave.

“What?” he asks.

“Rooke’s brother,” she says. “That’s what this is about.”

“How is this about Rooke’s brother?”

“He’s the one that made them. Who you’re gonna hear. And by the sounds of it he got nice and fucking murdered way before his time by the same guy that killed Rooke. Charles Clearson, or whatever. Blair broke into his car and took them, and an ID too. Victor Arias now, apparently. So it says. It’s pretty recent.”

“Blair— wait, what?” he asks. Celia stands up and pats him on the top of the head like he’s a—

You know what, no. He’s not making that comparison.

“I just thought I’d warn you, cause no one warned me,” she says. “Have fun. We’ll theorize in the morning.”

“Theorize,” he says flatly. She waves over her shoulder at him and then disappears into the house, slamming the door shut behind her. Bagel manages his way out before it closes entirely and the dog leaps onto the bench next to him, curling up in the gap under his bent legs.

“You want one too?” he asks, dangling a headphone in front of his nose. Bagel gives him a huff and then goes to sleep.

Yeah. That’s about what he thought.

—

—

—

Celia is woken the next morning by shouting.

It’s more disorienting than anything she’s experienced in the past while. She was growing used to the silence again and the comfort that came with it. The silence wasn’t something to be scared of anymore.

Rory was sleeping in her bed again, which tended to help, but it’s not like she was saying that aloud to anyone. It’s not like he was sleeping now anyway - the noise had woken up him in a similar fashion, though it looked like he was more concerned than she was.

No surprise there.

He’s already easing out of bed, bleary-eyed and trying to blink away the sleep. Celia reaches across the bed to grab his arm.

“Stay here.”

“Why?”

She doesn’t know why just yet, so she wishes Rory wouldn’t ask. She’s kept her mouth shut about the tapes, and every question he asks her unrelated or not makes her want to spill the beans.

Besides, that sounds like Dimara’s voice down the stairs, and after a moment of listening, the second almost sounds like… Kali? It’s definitely not anyone else in the house, which means one thing: it’s not good.

“Just… stay here,” she insists, swinging herself out of bed and into the vaguely chilly air. Apparently even fake-burning down can’t save the lack of warmth in this house’s walls, but she ignores that and shuffles down the hall to the top of the stairs. Vance is gone from the porch - probably retreated to his room, tapes and all. The clock on the wall reads half past eight - it’s no surprise that Dimara’s the only one up at this hour.

It is Kali, she comes to find. Kali being here is bad news, period, something that Celia knows intrinsically; it’s a feeling that settled in her bones the day she met her and never quite left. A significant other being brought into this unaware - that’s one thing. That significant other being a hunter who’d kill, willingly, at least half the occupants of this house? That’s another. You can only prattle on about Kali being different for so long before something proves her wrong.

And right now, it looks as if that very thing is happening. They’re right in each other’s faces, and the shouting has dissolved into something worse, more horrified. Kali looks like she’s about to cry. Dimara, she realizes with an equal amount of horror, looks like she already is.

Celia isn’t close enough to confirm it, but the ugly hitch to her words might be enough.

She’s done well enough blending into the wall, but Rory’s appearance at her side shatters it, and when Dimara looks up at the both of them Kali does too, without flinching.

Right, because she could kill them both. That’s reassuring.

“Who else knew?” Kali asks wildly. “Who else in this house fucking knew?”

“No one.”

“Don’t lie to me right now, because apparently you’ve been doing it enough—”

“No one else fucking knows!” Dimara insists. She’s right, Celia has absolutely no clue. She’s not sure if she wants to or not. “It was just me, okay? Would you rather me have told you I was there before, when you were falling apart? Would that have helped?”

“What would have helped is you not being involved in the first place!”

“Well, it’s a little late for that,” Dimara says, but now her voice is cold. “But don’t act like this is what I wanted all along, because you know it wasn’t.”

“You came into my life, remember?”

“And you’re the one that stayed.”

Celia’s quite convinced, until Kali stalks out the door and slams it so hard she feels it in the upstairs walls, that she’s going to have to get in-between them both. They certainly look angry enough to start swinging.

Dimara stares at the floor, teeth sunken viciously into her lower lip. She sees Rooke from the corner of her eye, inching down the hall, but by the time he reaches the railing to peer over at the commotion Dimara’s gone with a turn of the heel into the kitchen, yanking her phone free from her pocket.

“She knows about Alex,” Celia hears a moment later, distant. “I didn’t— no, I didn’t fucking tell her you were there, what do you think’s wrong with me?”

“Seriously, who is Alex?” Rooke asks quietly. Kali’s said that name before, and here it is again.

Something, she suspects, very bad happened to whoever Alex is.

Was, probably.

Neither of them have an answer for Rooke, though. She stays silent, staring at the closed door, and Rory shifts from foot to foot behind her, looking troubled about the whole situation. That’s definitely one word for it. He hesitates before he does so, but Rooke eventually slides around them to get to the stairs and then goes after Dimara, evidently.

Celia’s not sure how far he’ll get.

An overwhelming, almost crushing sense of guilt nearly overwhelms her even looking at him, thinking about what she knows. What they’re keeping from him.

How do they have any right to keep this from him? It’s not like it can be a secret forever. He’ll find out soon enough, and once he does he’s going to hate them all for hiding it.

If Vance stayed up all night, he has to be done them by now.

She has to start somewhere.

“Come with me,” she murmurs, grabbing Rory’s hand. He doesn’t protest when she begins to pull him down the stairs and then towards the basement, but then again he never does.

He’s the safest bet for starting on.

She hopes, anyway.

—

—

—

The way Kelsea’s looking at him, he’s beginning to worry he’s broken her.

It’s been this way for ten, fifteen minutes now. He’s gotten maybe half a dozen words out of her since he finished.

In Vance’s mind, telling her was better than making her listen outright. That’s what Celia did for him, and it had admittedly helped. It had softened the blow when he had finally gotten to the end and had to hear it himself.

He’s not so sure Kelsea has been offered that same amount of comfort from his words alone. Maybe Vance is just less tactful than he thought.

He passes a hand in front of her face, slowly. “Kels?”

“Um,” she says, but her eyes are still glazed over and staring faintly at the wall. “Sorry.”

“You’re good.”

She nods. Says nothing. Vance may be untactful and also increasingly impatient. He’s been ignoring the commotion upstairs for her sake, because he feels as if he focuses on anything else Kelsea may very well lose it. Whatever’s going on up there, it’s like she hasn’t heard a single second of it.

“It was the same guy,” she murmurs. “The one from the coffee shop? Does Rooke know?”

“No, he doesn’t. I wasn’t supposed to tell you either, but…”

“Why not?”

“Cause we knew this is how you’d take it.”

“Did you not take it the exact same way?” she asks, concerned. “Has everyone else listened to these except for me and him?”

“Not exactly,” he starts, interrupted by his door opening. Celia shoves Rory inside and then ducks in after him, shutting it with a soundless click. Kelsea at least glances over at them long enough to rid some of the fog from her eyes. 

“Well, I see someone beat me to it,” Celia says flatly. “How long was that, twelve hours?”

“Shut up,” he answers. “You’re clearly going to tell him; I get to tell someone, too.”

“Tell me what?” Rory asks. She directs him over to the bed and then to sit on the side of it, clambering over him to sit closer to the middle. Kelsea is sitting between them all, flipping the last tape over in her hand. Everyone looks a certain degree of troubled, all about different things. He’s still having trouble wrapping his brain around what he’s heard. It was difficult to do so in the middle of the night, alone, having no one to run to, no one to question. The only two people with the answers are either dead or, apparently, their direct enemy. And to think about what Aubrey told him, the possibility of it all.

Something bad really is happening.

“Blair found these,” Celia says. “Found being the generous term. And we got… a lot of information about the guy that killed Rooke.”

“So we know what he is?”

“Not exactly. That’s the one thing we don’t know. He’s immortal, most likely, or in the very least living on some sort of suspended time like Kelsea does. And he’s done a lot worse than just kill Rooke.”

“How much worse?”

Vance shouldn’t feel so bad having to break this to Rory, of all people. He felt awful enough telling Kelsea and still feels that way now, watching her flip the tape over as if something will change.

How are they supposed to tell Rooke?

“Just.... worse,” Celia says. “So I’m telling you to listen to them, or you can do it together.”

“No, he can have them first,” Kelsea interrupts, thrusting the box at Rory. She even scoots away for good measure as if trying to put as much distance between herself and the truth as she can. “I think— no, I know there’s a car in the woods. And I think it might be his. Beckett’s.”

“What?” he asks. It’s a turn he wasn’t expecting.

“I snuck up here back then, you know. Not very often, but I did. My parents didn’t want me very close because someone— Beckett, still lived up here. But someone dumped a car in the woods near the main road right around the time when I stopped seeing him. And I think it could be his.”

“It’s just a car,” Celia says.

“Is it?” Kelsea asks. “If this guy took the tapes and everything else out of the car in the first place then he could’ve missed something. And what if… what if his body is still there?”

“How could you have missed a body?”

“I wasn’t exactly looking for one!” Kelsea cries, folding her hands over her face. “I hate this.”

“What is going on?” Rory murmurs. He’s edging through the tapes with the tip of one finger, flipping through the contents of the box as if he’s discovered the most interesting thing in the world.

For all they know, he really has.

“Just go listen to them,” he instructs. “Kelsea can have them later, if she wants. Or maybe Tanis.”

“Dimara’s right, you know. She’ll tell Rooke in a heartbeat.”

“Because that’s what we should be doing.”

Celia hesitates, but there’s an agreeing nod at the tail end of it. He knows it. Nothing’s black and white in the world except for this; there’s no beating around the bush with it. Rooke needs to know, and it needs to happen sooner or later. This guy - Charles or Victor or whoever is still out there, and if he went after the both of them, anyone in this house could very well be next. The house looks gone to the outside world, but they can’t hide up here forever.

Sooner or later, something is going to push back.

—

—

—

To her immense, or maybe very poor credit, Celia tries her best.

She’s with Rory every minute that he’s listening to them, after she herds him back upstairs with the box tucked under his shirt in the first place. It’s a very obvious, poor hiding spot, but Rooke’s not around to notice and Dimara has vanished too.

She can’t busy herself with wondering why.

Rory goes through a textbook case of the phases - confused, and then angry, and then upset, and then confused all over again when he receives a new piece of information. She sticks the other headphone in her ear and starts writing things down on the re-listen, nudging him when he looks too lost to continue on. It’s everything that makes even an ounce of sense - addresses and people and things that seem like a possibility until Beckett later corrects himself and she crosses them out.

And he never, ever, talks about Rooke.

She only leaves him to go to the bathroom throughout the day, and makes him stop once to eat dinner with the rest of the house. Everyone is suspiciously silent, and Tanis is looking at all of them like she knows it.

She even puts enough time aside after dinner to ask about Kali, and Alex, but Dimara brushes her off so quickly it almost stings.

At some point she falls asleep. It grows later and the sky grows darker and she can only hold on for so long before she slips the headphone out and hands the notepad and pen over to Rory, who promptly sticks at least one of them between his teeth and starts to gnaw on it. She’s out like a light before she learns which one.

She wakes up, and she can hear him crying.

It’s dark as hell, and disorienting to boot. He must have turned the lamp off. She fumbles around blindly for a moment until she grabs a hold of him, or at least his arm. Everything previously on the bed has been pushed to the side, and he’s sitting in silence with the cassette player perched on the bedside table. Tape twenty-seven is lying inside it, but the reel has run out.

“I don’t know why I’m crying,” he says, voice exhausted. “There’s something wrong with me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“Kelsea didn’t even cry.”

“Kelsea hasn’t listened to them,” she points out, reminding herself to be gentle. Clearly he needs it. “It’s okay.”

“What about this is okay?” he asks, squeezing around his knees. He won’t let go of them despite her best efforts. “He got fucking murdered, that’s not okay, and Rooke doesn’t even know, and he’s still out there, and he’s probably going to kill one of us too—”

“Take it easy,” she pleads. “He’s not going to do anything to you.”

“It’s not me I’m worried about. It’s never me.”

Because he’s genuinely too good for this world and all of the shitty things in it, right. She forgets that a lot, in the easy moments. It’s easy to when all he does is smile and laugh and give what she’s pretty sure are the best hugs in the world. All he does, too, is worry when she’s not looking, and he never cares for himself or thinks twice about it.

They’re all in danger, and she knows it. She also knows that Rory would throw himself in front of it to take it off of the rest of them if she’d let him.

It’s a good thing she won’t.

“We’re going to figure this out,” she says. “Just take a deep breath.”

He does, at least. He listens to her more these days. The deep breath is coupled with more tears, a shake that takes hold of his entire body for a moment until she leans into his side, propping her head up on his shoulder.

“Hey,” she says softly. “You’re allowed to cry.”

“You never cry.”

“Well, I suck,” she offers. “We’ve established this.”

“You don’t suck.”

“I do,” she insists. “That’s why you’re good enough for the both of us.”

He nods. It doesn’t necessarily seem like agreeance, at least not to that statement. He’s too self-deprecating, unwilling to admit his own goodness more often than not. Maybe he’s just taking her voice and accepting it as a truth.

She’s never actually had someone trust her that much.

“Alright, come here,” she murmurs, flopping back down into the nest of blankets she’s created. He follows without words, curling up silently against her side until she can’t even see his face. It’s incredible how small he can make himself when he really wants to, and she hates it more than anything. He’s not meant to be so small.

Sometimes he is, though, and that’s okay. She’s still learning what’s okay and what isn’t.

But this - this will be, one day. She has to believe that.

Not for her sake, but for his.

—

—

—

“You better have a fucking explanation for this,” Blair mutters, stumbling into the hall. “I was sleeping for once.”

“You seem to sleep an awful lot for someone that supposedly needs to sleep very little,” Vance points out.

“That’s the thing, you see, I actually never get enough sleep—”

Vance grabs his arm before he can protest any further and heads for the stairs. If he gives him any longer Blair will put up a fight that Vance won’t win, and then this is all a bust. Sue him, maybe, but he doesn’t want to go out and do this on his own.

If this is even anything at all.

He already got the shovel - he scoops up that in his free hand and kicks Blair’s shoes out onto the front porch. In seconds they’re both outside, and Blair kicks listlessly at his left shoe as if he finds nothing interesting about it at all. 

Vance makes sure to lock the door for good measure. “Come on.”

“What are we doing?”

“Nothing, hopefully,” he says. He’ll explain on the way there. Kelsea said it wasn’t far, maybe a mile at most. A mile is nothing to the two of them, not when they could be there in seconds.

“You know it’s not nothing,” the voice says, and he jolts. It’s not the expected sound of Blair’s voice two feet to the left, but the one still safely nestled inside his own head. It’s starting not to feel safe anymore. He feels like he’s going insane.

Blair looks at him, unimpressed, and then shoves his feet into his shoes without bothering to put them on properly. “Jumpy,” he comments. “Lead the way.”

He does explain, to be fair, but there’s not much to get out. He’s done relaying what Kelsea told him by the time they’re down the drive, and then he peels off into the woods not far from the main road with Blair following along after him. For the most part it’s silent, which he finds he doesn’t mind. It’s easier to focus on everything going on around them without any talking - the forest comes alive at night, he’s discovered. It’s not just the insects and the birds anymore, the rustle of the wind through the trees. It’s so much more.

And it’s that damn voice, too. It’s active tonight, whatever it is. Whoever it is. Making idle comments here and there, casual conversation like there’s someone else walking alongside him.

He thinks Kelsea knows - well, not knows, but she at least suspects something is going on. He’s too unfocused on actual conversations sometimes, too lost in his own head and what it’s saying back to him.

No one else, though. He hasn’t had the courage to ruin whatever fragile peace they’ve had this past while.

“You already think I’m crazy, right?” he asks.

“Absolutely.”

He waits. Another thirty seconds go by - he thinks he sees the fragile, broken down shell of a car in the distance. Blair nudges him.

“What’s up?”

“I’ve been hearing a voice since August. Since I left Kelsea and Nadir.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s official diagnosis and therapist-worthy, not me-worthy.”

“No, like— it’s like someone else is living inside my head,” he explains, or at least tries to. He’s never said anything about it aloud or even tried, and now that he can definitely see a car coming into view, it's almost impossible. “It’s not just thoughts, it’s like how you’re talking to me right now. It’s like someone else is here but I’m the only one listening.”

“Because you are.”

Vance jumps again, despite himself. He feels like he knows that voice almost better than his own. “Fuck off,” he says, but there’s no feeling behind it.

Blair snorts, or something like that, and then breezes right past him when Vance’s feet begin to falter at the approach to the car. It’s almost completely lost in the undergrowth. Shrubbery and grass is poking out through the rusted holes, growing up through the eaten away floorboards.

Blair kicks one of the back rims and cream paint flakes away. “Are you hearing it right now?”

“You believe me?”

“I believe that you’re absolutely fucking insane, but people who are usually don’t lie. So.”

He would know. Blair would know it better than almost anyone else in the world, in fact. It hasn’t spoken up again but it’s like he can hear it about to start, the queue of a conversation he isn’t yet prepared for.

And nothing.

“You don’t actually think he buried him here, do you?” Blair asks, and Vance shuffles forward in the dirt, dragging the shovel’s tip along behind him. The undergrowth is sparser in patches off to the left; it could mean nothing. It could mean a lot.

Vance buries the spade in the dirt between them. “Only one way to find out, right?”

It’s an easy, somehow grateful distraction from the voice, silent now. Blair shoos him from the shovel and to the car, instead. He’ll get through it quicker than Vance will, and at least the car is available to pry through. Even a door thoroughly rusted shut is nothing to his strength now - he pulls it open with a grating, ugly creak, and around them the forest goes silent for a long moment.

“So you really don’t know who it is?” Blair asks.

“Who?”

“The voice.”

“Do you think it’s… someone?”

“A voice usually connotes a person, yeah,” Blair says. “You’ve never heard it before? And you’re sure of that.”

“Ninety-nine percent,” he answers. Vance would ideally like to believe that if he knew who the voice belonged to he’d recognize it. It definitely sounds like a male voice - it’s not his dad, it’s not Pax or Emmett. It’s no one, absolutely no one, that he knew from school. Not a neighbor or an old teacher. Nothing like that.

So who could it be? Someone he spoke to once ten years ago and never again? Someone he’s never even met?

So why him, then?

“I said you were the only one listening,” it says. Vance is about three and a half seconds from putting out an eviction notice on his own brain. It can hear his every thought - it knows him, he’s beginning to suspect, better than he knows himself. It knows all the bad parts and what he hates and the things that keep him awake at night—

“Calm down over there,” Blair says. Vance realizes he’s clutching at the door’s frame hard enough to indent the metal underneath his fingertips. “Just go through the car.”

Right. He still needs to do that. Distracting himself is one way to calm his racing heart, so he lowers himself carefully into the front seat and gets to work. Work, as it comes, is difficult. The entire seat has begun to peel away and for a long moment he feel suspended, about to fall right through the floor into the grass below.

The car, as he was dreading, is stunningly empty. There are a few papers in the glovebox, a manual and insurance dealings; many of them are almost completely eaten through. Some spare change lies abandoned in the center console, all from the sixties. He finds a knife under the passenger seat tucked in-between two folds of fabric, but it’s small and rusted over and the handle almost shakes loose when he pulls it free.

He forces the trunk, which takes longer than anything else. Blair’s apparently on the fast-track to excavating an entire lot around them, several feet deep in every direction. Vance can hardly see him.

There’s only a jacket in the trunk, alongside an old pair of boots. They look better preserved than anything else, but bugs scatter in every direction when he shakes out the jacket.

Something else was hidden underneath it, long and silver, hooked at one end. Like the knife the edges of it have begun to rust.

“Blair,” he calls, reaching for it. The curved end of the tire iron is darkened as if the rust has begun to spread, but he knows it’s not that. There’s something wedged into the end of it, bright white and picked clean, a shard the size of his fingernail.

It looks like bone, and it probably is.

“I think I got something,” Blair says, so distantly it sounds as if he’s underwater. Vance has never abandoned anything quicker - he leaves the tire iron where it is and scrambles to the deepest part of the hole, already deeper than he is tall. This is precisely why he brought Blair; he had no desire to spend the whole night out here, and only Blair would be willing to do something this odd with no previous knowledge of it.

He eases himself over the edge and then drops down next to him, landing with a thud in the loosened dirt. Blair’s crouched in the far corner, fingertips dug into the wall and pulling out handfuls of dirt by the second.

There’s something there, something long and off-white, discolored by the earth.

That’s not good. Yes, it was his idea, but it’s still not good.

“There’s a tire iron in the trunk,” he says, voice slightly weak. “It looks like it’s covered in blood. And something else, maybe.”

“What’s something else?”

“Bone.”

Blair runs a finger along whatever it is that’s stuck in the dirt, presumably an arm bone or something from the leg. A rib, maybe, but there’s no curve to suggest that. It looks more intact than Vance would have expected it to be.

“In the trunk, you said?” Blair asks, and he nods, crouching down in his place when Blair stands and begins to haul himself out of the hole. This is just one piece. If one bone is here a whole body’s worth has to be, somewhere. If there’s bone on the iron it came from somewhere, but where? His fucking head?

In order to figure that out, he’ll have to pull more apart. He’ll have to find his damn skull.

He doesn’t want to do that at all.

“Well, that’s not good,” Blair says. His shadow falls over Vance as he returns to the edge of the hole, waving the tire iron about as if it’s not their best piece of evidence.

He feels, suddenly, at a loss for words. Maybe they shouldn’t have done this - it’s too late for that, now, but the sense of regret flooding over him is stronger than anything else. Someone else ought to have done this. He doesn’t want to tell Rooke.

He doesn’t want to tell anyone. 

There’s a noise above him, a minuscule shift in the atmosphere. For a second dread washes over him as he imagines someone else following them out here, at Rooke realizing what they’ve done behind his back.

It’s not Rooke.

Another noise. He hears the footstep this time, unfamiliar and painfully light. Almost unnoticeable. 

He looks up. The moon is a sliver, producing not nearly enough light to assist him in any way. He sees the canopy above, the surrounding shadows. He hears the noise, the breath of another human. A living, breathing human, and the click of something as it’s pulled back. That’s a weapon. He can’t see anything else.

All he can see, when he stops trying to figure out what’s happening, is Blair standing in the same spot he was before, that sliver of moonlight reflected back in his eyes, and then something, a mere shadow, half a second before it slams dead center into Blair’s chest.

And then Blair’s gone, as he topples over backwards and disappears.

There’s another click. His heart starts again. It sounds like a chamber being refilled.

A bullet won’t kill Blair, but that wasn’t a bullet. It was something else.

Oh, Jesus, God, someone help him.

“Are you coming out little werewolf, or am I coming in?” someone asks. It’s no one he recognizes, no surprise there. He’s bad with voices.

Someone knows he’s down here, and they know what he is, and Blair…

Blair can’t be fucking dead. Vance won’t allow him to be.

He looks up again. His chest is about to explode. Another shadow falls over him, directly overhead. Whoever it is is two seconds from following through on their promise.

“You have to do it,” the voice says. For once in his life he cradles the sound of it close. It’s familiar. It’s not going to hurt him. It’s… helping him? Is it?

He’s never changed outside of the full moon. He’s not even sure he knows how. All he does know is that Blair— Blair absolutely cannot be fucking dead but Vance is about to be, and if he’s dead then Blair certainly is. They’re both dead and no one will be any the wiser, if they’re ever found at all.

The voice, whoever it may be, is right. He has to. He has nothing else, no defense mechanism, nothing to save him.

Nothing except the claws he feels shredding through his skin, opening up the ends of his fingers. He clenches them into a fist and for once they don’t tear into his own skin as if they’re ready for something else.

He has nothing except for this.

And this is definitely going to be more than enough.

—

—

—

Celia hears a predictably loud noise sometime in the middle of the night.

She rolls over. Rory comes with her some of the way. It hasn’t even been two hours since she last looked at the clock and then fell asleep with him curled up against her, and he’s still that way now.

The noise gets louder. Louder and louder and louder, and then it sounds like the front door comes crashing in.

She sits up. Rory tightens his arm around her waist and doesn’t move.

“What was that?” he breathes. She shuffles away to the edge of the bed and lets her toes touch the ground, cold against her bare skin. Rory lets himself be dragged until she pries his fingers loose from her hip to stand up, treading silently to the door.

He scrambles out himself, something uneasy to his eyes. She can still hear something - rhythmic, uneven thumping and scratching along the floor, or the wall, and lays a hand on the door anyway.

“Don’t,” Rory says, the second she opens the door.

There’s a massive, hulking shape on the other side, half a foot away from her. Celia yelps before she can help herself, before she can do literally anything else other than die of shame the second the noise escapes. She, without even realizing it, is halfway back across the room away from it before a full second has passed.

“Oh, God,” Rory says; he’s leapt back onto the bed on all-fours, as if that’s going to help. “Is that—”

“If you’re seriously about to ask me if that’s a random wolf in our house or Vance I’m going to reach back there and smack you,” she snaps, although she’s clutching onto the bed-frame just as hard as he is.

She has no proof that the wolf standing in the doorway is Vance - she’s never seen him. Last month Blair and Nadir let him out while they all stayed upstairs away from him and he came back the next morning without anything happening, fully human again. He had control over himself. Mostly. At least on the full moon.

This wasn’t the full moon.

“Vance,” she says slowly. The blurry, enormous figure in the doorway blinks at her - that’s all she can see. Golden eyes. That, and a very blurry outline that shows he’s got them trapped in here. 

The wolf steps forward. It’s Vance. Anything else would have killed her by now, certainly. Claws click on the hardwood floor - that’s what she was hearing, before. It doesn’t explain the other noises.

He stretches forward; his jaw opens, closes, and then opens again, almost uncertainly, the flash of inch-long teeth made no less terrifying by the hesitance. She stays stock still when he reaches forward and nudges her hand, still wrapped around the metal frame, and then the aforementioned jaw closes around her wrist. She feels the sharp pin-prick of teeth against her skin. It sounds like Rory is just about hyperventilating behind her.

She gets why, to be honest.

Vance pulls. She doesn’t resist. If she resists she loses a hand. He pulls her two, three feet across the room back towards the door and then lets go, leaving her to stand there as he backs the last of the way out the door and into the hall.

There’s blood on her wrist and dripping down her arm - a lot of it. Not hers. He didn’t even break the skin.

She stares. Now that he’s in the hallway, slightly illuminated, she can see what was hidden before in the darkness of his mottled fur. It’s not just in his mouth. Blood is stained down his throat and chest, streaks of it down both front legs all the way to his feet.

“What did you do?” she asks, taking a step into the hall after him. The front door is caved in and hanging from one hinge. That explains their initial noise, but nothing else.

Vance makes a sound. In werewolf-speak it sounds very, very upset. She’s not sure why she’s out here asking him questions when he can’t properly answer her.

He turns, bounding back down the stairs and out the wildly creaking front door. He’s good at breaking doors. No surprise there, considering the size of him. He only returns when she finds she can’t move, or rather doesn’t know if she should. Silhouetted in the front door he looks even more monstrous than before, dripping with blood and staring at her, only her.

“Rory,” she says. “Go wake everyone else up.”

“Why?” He’s still on the bed. She doesn’t blame him.

“I don’t know,” she responds, making her decision. She heads down the stairs after him and watches him sprint away once she’s halfway down, leaping from the porch in a move far more graceful than anything she’s seen him complete as a human. “Just hurry. I don’t know how fast he is.”

Fast, it turns out. She’s somehow surprised by it. By the time she fumbles some shoes on he’s around the first bend in the drive and almost lost in the shadows of the road.

Running and Celia still don’t get along, she’s decided, but she tears after him anyway.

She goes after him, and loses him more than once. The only thing keeping her on the path after him once they leave the road is the noise he’s making, the cracking and breaking of the forest around him. She loses him and finds the path he’s created through the undergrowth just as quickly. He’s taking longer to navigate here, but he’s clearing the way for her at the same time, without even trying. She’s almost caught up to him by the time she stumbles her way out into clearing behind him.

It’s a lot to process, even for her.

She sees Blair first. Blair on the ground ten feet away, dead or either faking it very well. There’s something sticking out of his chest, half the length of her forearm. That’s just what she can see.

Okay, maybe he’s not faking it.

She sees other things - the car entangled in the undergrowth, the hole, the abandoned shovel. She has enough time to think oh, they didn’t before her brain refocuses on the fact of Blair, possibly dead on the ground, something sticking out of his chest.

There’s a fucking stake in his chest. That’s not good.

And there’s nothing she can do, either. He’s never got a pulse. He’s not breathing, but is he ever? How is she supposed to know if he’s still alive?

Celia drops to her knees beside him and wraps two hands around the stake, but it doesn’t budge. He doesn’t even flinch.

That’s not good.

Vance shuffles up behind her back, still just as menacing and hulking. For some reason she feels better about that now. The size of him compared with the noise he makes again - the same small, upset one from before, makes no sense at all.

There’s reason to be upset, alright.

She pulls again, and the stake shifts to the side. She waits for a reaction but gets none. If it’s in his heart, he’s dead. Actually, not coming back from it, dead. Looking down on it like this she doesn’t see how it couldn’t be.

Vance would have come and got them whether he was dead or alive, she realizes. She still can’t tell either way.

“Please tell me he’s alive,” she says. The stake actually pulls free this time, maybe half an inch. It’s something. Vance nudges her in the arm as soon as she relaxes her grip, insistent. He knows something she doesn’t. “Do you know if he’s alive? Jesus, the first thing we’re doing after this is teaching you how to communicate.”

He nudges her again, so she readjusts and pulls, gaining another inch. It’s getting easier now that she’s moved it.

“What the fuck?” Dimara says, voice high-pitched and alarmed. There’s more behind her. Everyone’s gotten here, now, and she can’t focus on it. Vance even nudges her again as if to say exactly that.

She digs her fingers in, pulls, and nearly goes careening head over heels as the last of the stake comes free from his chest. It’s dripping with blood, the pointed end dragging a long, sticky trail over it as she regains her balance. Nadir’s the next one on the ground next to her, halfway hysterical. Nadir sort of has every right in the world to be hysterical.

Celia leans forward. She doesn’t want to. The hole in his chest starts almost dead center but hooks right, as if he was standing at angle when it went in. It’s jagged, bleeding sluggishly, and when she looks in she can see his heart, just the edge of it. Intact. The hole scrapes past it and even further in. Nearly to his back.

One by one everyone is clamoring around, wide-eyed and horrified. “He’s not fucking dead,” she says. He looks dead.

He’s not.

She looks up, just in time for Dimara to drop to the ground. Kelsea is torn, she can tell, between what to look at, leaving Rory to be the one who looks as if they’re going to throw up, as per usual, and Tanis to zero in on the confusion of it all. Rooke’s eyes are huge, distraught, but not at Blair. Or maybe they were, but not anymore. Now that those words have been said out-loud they’ve refocused, over her shoulder and onto the car hidden in the undergrowth her.

Of course he’d recognize it. Shit.

Vance nudges her again. She turns and he’s still crouched down low behind her back, ears flattened to his head. He backs up, further and further until he’s treading through ground that hasn’t yet been trampled, all the way to the edge of the hole. Celia stays on the ground and crawls after him, peering over the edge when he does so before her.

“Oh,” she says plainly. “I’m going to guess he wasn’t down there when you dug the hole in the first place.”

There’s a body down there. Fresh, still bleeding. Almost unrecognizable. It’s throat is torn wide open and there are huge gouges all the way from his shoulders to the end of his stomach. Claw marks.

She steels her gaze forward, to the abandoned, warped gun several feet across the hole and the crossbow like figure to the left of it. That’s a hunter if she ever saw one, armed more than she’d ever like anyone to be armed.

Celia finally allows herself to look at Vance, again, and locks eyes with two golden-yellow ones.

She would have never imagined they could look guilty, but they do.

They came out here looking for Beckett. It couldn’t be anything else. Rooke hasn’t put that together yet because he couldn’t. There’s no possibility of it. They haven’t hold him anything. Blair and Vance came out here for it and got attacked. Vance ripped the throat open, and a lot more than the throat, of the person that nearly killed Blair.

They haven’t told him anything, but they need to.

“Alright,” she says, forcing her voice steady. “That’s it. No more fucking secrets.”

Everyone, for once, looks to her. It’s not Dimara. It’s just her.

She waits, a long and painful moment. Nadir is still leaning over Blair, one hand curled around his neck. As she waits, two of his fingers twitch, so faintly she almost misses it. A sign of life.

Celia sighs. “Nice one,” she says to Vance, because it’s the truth. Because he killed someone but they’re alive, because of it.

It has to be the truth. 

It has to be good enough, because nothing else right now is.


	3. All Of Your Monsters

He could go anywhere in the world, theoretically speaking, but Rooke can’t move.

He still works, so to speak. He knows he does because he sat down at the edge of the hole, of course. That wouldn’t have happened if he was frozen.

It’s been a long time. He doesn’t know how long, per say, but a while. It took long enough for them to explain the very generalized version of things. The abridged version. The second they had Blair awake for longer than a few seconds though it had ended, abruptly and without any fanfare, in the troubling quest to get him back to the house.

Rooke had done his part - hovered and watched and made sure no one got a face-full of the brush as they went tripping their way back to the road.

And then, predictably, he had come back.

He was alone after that, for a long while. Dimara and Celia had come back halfway through the night and dealt with the body. Helping them had been a thought somewhere in the back of his brain, but he hadn’t. Moving felt like more trouble than it was worth, so he had sat down at the edge of the hole and let his legs swing over the edge, free at last.

His brain was more sluggish. It was refusing to catch up with everything else, unable to comprehend what he had heard, what he had been told. Somewhere in the earth below him are the remains of his brother’s body, cracked bones where life had once been. The job wasn’t done with Rooke - it never was. He was always going to come back.

Rooke knew his brother was up to something, but keeping track of such things when he could barely keep track of himself in those years was beyond impossible. Beckett was gone more often than not, but never for good. He never up and left.

Rooke thought he had.

“Rooke?” Tanis asks. He didn’t even hear her coming. He still finds himself largely unable to move, but tilts his head in her direction, acknowledging her presence.

“Do you need me to come back?”

“No,” she says. After a moment’s hesitation, she sits down beside him, keeping her legs crossed. His eyes remain fixated at the bottom of the hole. The light beginning to bloom in the sky is going to make it more obvious soon enough.

“Is something wrong?” he asks.

“I think everything’s wrong,” she says. “Or did you mean something else?”

“Blair…”

“Is okay. Relatively speaking. He’s taking longer to heal, but they think that’s because of how close it came. I guess a stake nearly in the heart will do that to someone.”

He nods, but it feels like an automated, expected response. He’s not sure he has anything else in him but that, and Tanis doesn’t look like she’s expecting any more, either. That’s good. He might feel compelled to put on more of a show for anyone else.

“It’s been hours,” he says slowly. “I can’t wrap my brain around it.”

“That’s okay.”

“It’s not— I thought he left me, and that wasn’t fair to him, because he didn’t know I was there. He had no way to know. I thought he finally got tired of all of the pain and the reminders and left for somewhere better. He didn’t even make it to the road.”

“He wasn’t trying to leave.”

“He should have. If he had left with the rest of my family nothing would have happened to him.”

“You don’t know that,” she says softly. “You don’t know what would have happened.”

“I antagonized him, and got myself killed, and then Beckett felt compelled to figure out what happened when even I didn’t have the answers to that myself and then he came back and killed him, too. It’s my fault he’s dead.”

“Hey,” Tanis says, voice not harsh but stunningly insistent. She plants both hands on his shoulders and squeezes, forcing his eyes up to her. “It’s not your fault he’s dead.”

“Then who’s fault is it?”

“You know whose. Only one person killed him. You didn’t want this.”

“You’re right, I didn’t,” he says. “I didn’t, but it happened anyway. Why does all of this shit just keep happening?”

She looks sad for him. Not someone else getting adding to the ever-expanding train of people that pity him day in and day out - he can’t stand it getting any longer. Everything goes back to his death, and him still being here now is putting them all in danger. Charles Clearson is going to come back and finish whatever job he started, if he isn’t already. Someone else might beat him - hunters, or other creatures. Everything wants them gone and he doesn’t even know where to begin.

“I’m sorry I didn’t know,” Tanis says. “I would have told you.”

“That’s why they didn’t say anything to you. They knew that.”

“They should have.”

“You know why they didn’t.”

A part of him wants to be angry, but he can’t. It feels as if he’s two ugly seconds from falling apart at the seams and it’s all because of this. The pain coursing through him now is exactly what everyone up at the house was trying to avoid.

It’s just been one day after another of people trying to protect him, ninety years ago and now, too.

He’s thanking them by putting them all in danger.

“I think I should leave,” he murmurs. “You guys won’t, but I can. It’ll be better for all of you if I just disappear and not come back.”

“You’re not going anywhere.”

“Tanis—”

“You’re not going anywhere,” she repeats, firm. “It’s nine of us or none of us.”

“What if someone else dies because of me?”

Her fingers tighten over his shoulder and press into bone. She’s scared of the same thing he is; denying it would be foolish for them both. It feels inevitable, impending. Sooner or later someone is going to face consequences for this, for daring to exist in the most dangerous time he’s ever felt. Somehow even his own death didn’t feel as bad as this.

“No one’s going to die.”

“You don’t know that,” he echoes. “You have no idea.”

“I might. I could try scrying, or…”

Her voice trails off. Up until this point Rooke had still been unfocused, but now he looks at her properly. She blinks a few times, and then she’s somewhere else. Her eyes are still the same, but it’s like he’s going invisible.

“Tanis?” he asks.

“Oh my god,” she breathes. “Him— Clearson, or whatever. I’ve seen him before.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I was scrying, before. All the way back in June, when I was still living in the cottage. It was like the town had been completely abandoned, but he was there. He caught me off guard and attacked me, except when I came back there was still blood like whatever he had done almost worked in real life. It was him, Rooke. He looked almost the exact same as he does now— fucking hell, I was trying to forget about that.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why were you trying to forget?”

Tanis swallows. Something in him has settled with her hands on his shoulders, but it threatens to rear its ugly head again at the nervous look on her face. “It was bad. I don’t know. It felt like the apocalypse had just happened and somehow I was the only one that had survived it - except for him. And the way he spoke… he knew what I was, and he knew what was happening. He spoke as if he had planned it all.”

It feels like everything - the past few months, him dying in the first place, has all led to this. Rooke just doesn’t know what this is.

And he really, really feels like he needs to.

“He’d know me to see me,” Rooke says. “Do you think he’d know you?”

“I think so, yeah. He was in my vision but it felt like the future. And he knew me.”

“Listen to me, okay, you can’t let him see you. You can’t go anywhere near him. If you’re right and he sees you—”

“He’d regret even looking me in the eye.”

“I’m serious, Tanis, listen to me,” he pleads. “You’ll die. It doesn’t matter what you do. If it comes down to you versus him, it’ll be you. After me, after what happened to Beckett, I don’t know if I can handle him getting anyone else.”

He doesn’t expect her to give up on squeezing his shoulders to hug him, instead, but that’s exactly what she does. Even after everything they’ve been through he still doesn’t peg her as the hugging type. Nadir gets one, sometimes. He gets a few.

That’s it. He has to remind himself to treasure it despite how sick he feels otherwise.

“If it’s any of us versus him,” she says. “It’s going to be him.”

Her voice is so strong, so full of conviction, that Rooke actually believes it for a second. It’s easy to travel down that path when he remembers the sound of her voice just a few months ago, scared and seconds from breaking. He had been the cause of that, watching as if stuck behind a two-way mirror, silenced and screaming. Even remembering it now makes him want to curl up and let himself fade away for good.

This is his doing, whether she believes it or not. Someone is still out there, and if she says the apocalypse is coming, then he’s the one who started it.

It would be so easy to lay down, to vanish for good. It would be so easy it hurts.

But if something really is coming, and it all started with him, then he’s going to be here when it ends, too.

—

—

—

Kelsea stands on the road for a long time.

She’s got nothing better to do, really. She allowed herself to walk down here with Tanis but had gone no further. Rooke could barely focus right now - her presence and overwhelming worry wouldn’t do anything but make it worse.

Her other option, the logical one, is to walk her sorry butt back to the house and deal with it. If she could handle the rolling of her stomach, the non-existent tang of blood in the back of her throat, she would.

It turns out Kelsea’s not equipped to handle that. Who would’ve thought?

Blair is going to be okay. She knows this, in the logical part of her brain. Every other part is screaming, trying to get her to properly absorb the fact that he got a stake in the chest and the hole is still there. What does it matter if it’s healing, if the blood’s clotting, if the skin is starting to knit back together? It’s still there.

They’ll always know it was there.

Kelsea almost wants to run back home. She wants to be safe, wants her dad to hug her and her mom to kiss the top of her head and tell her that everything is going to be alright.

Would she appreciate the lies, though? Probably not.

She stands there long enough that she accepts that Rooke and Tanis aren’t coming out, at least for some time.

There’s only one other thing she can do, and that’s find Vance.

He’s been gone for hours, since they got Blair back to the house in the first place. She had tried to go near him and he had backed away like their positions had been reversed, like he was the one scared of her now. Digging her fingers into the scars on her arms once he had taken off had done nothing to bring him back.

Rory’s seen him in the treeline behind the house and beyond, stalking through the shadows. Watching. Waiting for something. She doesn’t know what.

Dimara doesn’t think he’ll change back until something’s calmed down, whatever that may be. Clearly his emotions are a swirling tornado, the category ramping up by the minute. He changed sporadically, purposefully, two weeks out from the full moon. He killed someone. He saved Blair’s life, and probably his own.

They had dragged the body back to the house, and the shovel Vance had brought out too. Now they had a hunter and his weapons buried in their backyard, what was left of it all. There had been bullets loaded into the chamber.

Silver bullets.

He definitely saved his own life.

Kelsea shuffles through the dew-wet grass around the side of the house, past the mound of dirt left in the backyard, and continues towards the trees. It doesn’t take as long as she expected to find him; a few minutes of peeking around trees and into the distance produces him slinking towards her from the deepest part of the forest, low to the ground and almost completely hidden by the undergrowth. It’s a deliberate move, she can tell. He doesn’t want to be seen.

At least not by anyone but her, anyway. If he didn’t want her around he wouldn’t have come out.

“Hey,” she says. She feels stupid talking to a wolf, but there’s nothing else to do. It’s that, and keep her eyes deliberately away from the blood dried down his front. With the sun coming up it’s impossible to ignore.

Kelsea finds she doesn’t care as much as she thought she would, that Vance ripped someone to shreds a few hours ago. She’s keeping her eyes away for his benefit, not her own.

“Are you ready to come back now?” she asks. He tilts his head at her, as if he doesn’t quite understand. Maybe he hasn’t sorted his emotions out yet.

She hasn’t either, so she can’t exactly blame him.

“Blair’s okay,” she tells him. His shoulders deflate. “He’s healing. Slowly. But he’s okay.”

He knew that, though. He knew Blair was alive before anybody else did or else he wouldn’t have been so insistent to fix it.

He does a slow circle around her, padding to the treeline and then all the way back, headed deeper into the trees for a long few seconds before he comes back and settles at her side. There’s still something uneasy to him, shifting restlessly. His eyes, unlike the rest of them, won’t fixate on one spot for more than a moment before he’s off looking elsewhere.

Like she said - watching.

“Nothing else is out here.” She goes for convincing and fails by a long shot, mostly because she has no idea what the truth is. If one hunter was out there, who’s to say there aren’t a dozen more lurking in the shadows? Kelsea finds herself doing a rotation as well, looking as far off into the distance as her eyes will allow her. If something’s coming, she wouldn’t know. Everything would boil down to Vance protecting her in that moment.

Vance, who as she discovers when she completes her circle, has left. She sees a tail whisk away into the bushes and he doesn’t reappear.

She waits for him, and is rewarded less than a minute later by the unnatural sound of breaking bone, a harsh, muffled cracking in the middle of the forest.

She’s heard that sound before.

Kelsea flees back to the house as quickly as her feet will take her. It looks like Rooke and Tanis are still gone, and only Celia and Rory are in the living room now. They must have brought Blair downstairs. Dimara peers out of the kitchen when she goes thundering up the stairs, but she doesn’t bother stopping for anyone.

She grabs the first set of clothes she finds in Vance’s room, certainly nothing that actually constitutes as an outfit, and then the blanket off the end of his bed just in case.

“Hey,” Dimara calls at her, halfway down the stairs, well in advance of the front door. Kelsea skids to a stop in the front hallway. “You got him?”

She nods, slightly breathless. Dimara lobs her a water bottle, underhanded, and it lands with a soft thud in the pile she’s got in her arms, before reaching for her jacket on the back of the door. Kelsea doesn’t stick around to wait for her.

She treads carefully once back in the woods, knowing without any proof that there’s no wolf to look out for, anymore. She could walk right over Vance, actual human Vance, almost without noticing.

And without him to watch, anything else out here could be closer than ever.

Kelsea finds him easier than expected - he’s managed to pull himself up into something almost resembling a sitting position, back scraping against the wide trunk of an oak tree, towering into the sky. Like this there’s no ignoring the blood. She lets her face go carefully neutral, refusing to acknowledge it one way or another. It’s everywhere, and even when he drags a shaking hand over his mouth it doesn’t budge. It’s been dried for hours.

He reaches up without really looking at her; Kelsea crouches down and holds out the entire bundle of things in her arms, and he ends up with the water bottle, downing half of it right before her. Within seconds after the fact he’s choking it back up, throwing up what little he got down right back into the dirt. It’s tinged pinky-red with blood.

At least it’s not his blood.

“Am I going to get eaten if I come over there?” Dimara asks distantly. Kelsea can hear her picking her way towards them louder than she ever walked.

“I’m not,” Vance starts, jaw working furiously. “I’m not sure I appreciate that joke right now.”

“It’s okay,” she murmurs. He shakes his head, clutching the water bottle tighter. It cracks under his fingers, over and over. When he does nothing else she eventually drapes the blanket over him, giving him at least one appropriate thing to cling onto. It looks like he needs it.

“Have you talked to Kali?” Vance forces out.

“Why would I have talked to Kali?”

“I don’t know, maybe because both me and Blair almost died a few hours ago because a hunter who shouldn’t have even known we were here showed up and nearly killed us?”

Kelsea lays down the clothes next to him and reaches forward to squeeze his arm. That simple touch will do nothing to get rid of his hysteria, but maybe it could do something. 

“He’s not from Kali’s family.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Vance—”

“You don’t know that, because you haven’t talked to her,” he says. “I didn’t— fuck, I don’t even know what I’m saying, I definitely meant to kill him.”

Dimara came out here to get him back to the house, not to get lectured. That what it sounds like right now, and Kelsea doesn’t particularly like being stuck in the middle of it. Despise what she wished, his shaking is only getting worse.

“If you don’t calm down, you’re going to—”

“I know,” he interrupts, pulling in a breath through clenched teeth. “I know, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she repeats. It’s not okay at all. Blair nearly died and he nearly died and then he killed the perpetrator, all within a minute of each other. He’s hysterical about it. What else is he supposed to be feeling?

He reaches across himself, towards her, and she takes the water bottle from him, gently setting it down in the dirt. Dimara steps in-between them, forcing Kelsea to let go of his arm.

“I’ll talk to her,” she says, but it sounds like a lie. “Let’s go.”

Together they pull Vance up to his feet, and Kelsea waits until his knees have stopped quaking to scoop up everything she’s abandoned oh the forest floor. He’s streaked with dirt and covered in ugly splatters of blood. Ideally a shower would be able to fix all of this, but Kelsea’s not that delusional. She almost wishes she was.

At least he’s back, now. It’s not as if she thought she wouldn’t get him back, but with everything that’s been going on…

It’s just hard to trust, is all.

—

—

—

Tanis eventually herds him back to the house.

He feels like Bagel, on a leash, being pulled in a direction that he doesn’t want to go. Issue being he doesn’t have one in mind anyway.

Everyone in the house looks at him guiltily as if they shouldn’t be doing it at all. Something about them is haunted, too. As every little thing settles over them all, the reality of the situation, the mood worsens.

At least them being haunted is accurate.

He lets himself drift downstairs once everyone leaves him alone, silent and unwilling to appear. Nadir’s drifted off, and Blair’s out cold once again. He’s alive and breathing, though, curled up asleep as if this could be any other day. It’s dark enough that Rooke can’t see the healing hole in his chest, so it might as well be.

Dimara is waiting for him when he finally comes back upstairs. In the time he’s been gone Tanis has fallen asleep in one of the armchairs by the television, but she looks too far gone to hear either of them.

“Have you talked to Kali?” he asks.

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

Upstairs, the house goes silent once again as the showers stop and the pipes stop rattling about. “Vance? Can you blame him?”

“No. I just don’t know what everyone else wants me to do.”

He shifts, and then sits down on the couch. His brain is racing a mile a minute, and sitting most likely won’t help any, but he likes to think that mentality will get him somewhere eventually.

“I know I don’t know what’s going on,” he starts. “Not with you two, at least. But we need to know, right?”

“I know.” She sighs, sitting down on the couch next to him. “We just might have to find out some other way.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think she’ll even talk to me, if I try. Let alone tell me who it was. I wouldn’t either, after what I did. What I didn’t do. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does. You remember that she stuck around even after finding out about all of this, right? That has to mean something.”

Dimara levels him with an unreadable gaze, and then bumps her shoulder against his. “When did you become a relationship counsellor?”

“I’m not. I’m just… trying to do something. I’m not good at anything else.”

“You’re good at plenty of things.”

“Like what? Getting possessed?”

“Did you just make a joke about that? Weird,” she says flatly, obviously so. She stands up, shoving at his shoulder once again. “I’m sorry, by the way.”

“That I got possessed? I think we’ve established that.”

“Stop it,” she insists. “About… all of this. Your brother. Not telling you.”

For a minute there it was like he was living in an alternate universe, where he had forgotten about it already. There’s no way that world actually exists. He doesn’t know what else to do, so he stares at the floor until he comes up with a response.

“I know why you didn’t. It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not okay.” Dimara looked as if she had been about to leave him be, for once, but turns around back to him as if to emphasize her point. “I don’t want you to think it’s okay, because it’s not. We lied to you, kept things from you. It was your business to know and we should have told you.”

They all need to start doing that. Tanis needs to tell him about the man being one and the same to them both. They need to collect everything Blair gathered, every piece of information still lurking about somewhere, and put it together.

Ideally, they need to figure this out. Rooke isn’t sure they live in an ideal world.

“I’ll figure something out,” Dimara continues. “And I’ll see if I can talk to her. In the meantime, are you going to listen to them?”

Rooke digs his fingers into the couch’s edge and tries not to cry at the thought. It’s not as if he has much of a choice in the matter - he has to. If he doesn’t it becomes a looming, dark cloud over his head for however much longer he exists. It’s not a choice when that’s the alternative.

“I think Kelsea has them, but… after that. I will.”

“Okay. If you need to talk, you know where to find me.”

“Always do,” he says, forcing a smile. Her matching one is equally grim. He appreciates that no one is putting up a charade for his well-being anymore. There’s no shielding him from this.

They’re all in the middle of it, now.

He can’t shake the feeling that he was the one who dragged them all there in the first place.

—

—

—

Kelsea waits until Vance is asleep, and then stares at the tapes for the better part of twenty minutes.

She didn’t anticipate him falling asleep, is the thing. She had planned on staying close regardless; she knew what could happen when you got too lost in your own head. If left for too long he might start seeing the blood all over his hands again.

Now that he’s asleep and she’s perched at the edge of the bed, box still in her lap, she’s too scared to move. Why risk waking him up when he so desperately needs the sleep?

Sometimes she feels like an undeniable coward, and right now is one of those moments. What stake does she have in this, really, outside of seeing Beckett maybe once or twice, a small figure hundreds of yards away? A personal connection of any kind if non-existant.

If she’s not going to listen to them, too, why not give them to Rooke?

She has to. She might as well get it over with.

She eases the first one into the cassette player and jams both headphones tight into her ears, easing herself down on the end of the bed away from Vance’s slightly curled legs. They have to figure out who attacked them last night, but most importantly what this guy actually is if he’s been alive this whole time and doing god only knows what.

Kelsea tries to take in every word as if she’s truly an outside party to little or no active involvement, like she doesn’t have a stake in this whatsoever.

His voice sounds like Rooke’s though, just enough to be recognizable. She hates that more than she thought she could hate something so simple.

It’s a process, sifting through the tapes. Some are two or three minutes and some are closer to twenty, packed with information as if Beckett couldn’t get it out fast enough. She pauses when she has to, absorbing what she deems the most important parts, and then repeats them soundlessly to herself. Names and locations and things he’s seen, over and over.

Locked inside Vance’s room with the curtains drawn it feels like no time has passed at all, though her brain registers hours passing, more of them than what seems feasible. Vance is restless even in sleep, constantly twitching as if he knows something isn’t right.

Before she knows it, she only has twenty-seven left.

She stares at it before she dares start the stupid thing, breath held, chesting aching with the anticipation of it all.

She really, really doesn’t want to do this, but she’s come this far.

There are minutes, most likely, until the end of this. After this she’ll have no choice but to pack all of this back into the box and head off to Rooke, to give him the answers he deserves.

But if she’s not ready for it, will he ever be?

She doesn’t think a timeline exists where he would be.

—

—

—

When everyone else pulls apart, to sleep or to dream or to think about something else even for a few hours, Rooke finds himself going to work.

It’s the only thing he can do other than think about it constantly, and he doesn’t want to do that.

He has a feeling, if he wasn’t already dead, that he wouldn’t survive doing that.

He’s still not entirely sure on the whole concept of working Dimara’s laptop, but they’ve spent a great deal of time this past month teaching him the ins and outs of the internet and the secrets it holds. Some of it, he thinks, will always be a mystery.

But until Kelsea’s done, until he has something else to do, there’s one big thing that’s still lurking in the back of his mind, next to everything else.

The way they talk about it, if anything is going to know what Charles Clearson is, it would be the internet.

Besides, it’s not like he needs to sleep. Maybe closing his eyes for a few hours would help, but he gets the feeling he knows what he would see behind his closed eyelids. He knows damn well what he would imagine, all of the grisly and gruesome options behind what happened, and not one of them would be right. Every one he comes up with will be worse than the real thing.

It’s more difficult than Rooke thought it would be, though. They always knew things existed out there, more than it was possible to really know, but the sheer number boggles him. There are pages upon pages of things from around the world, countries he couldn’t even pinpoint on a map, unpronounceable names.

And, predictably, hundreds of them are unkillable or immortal or some weird in-between.

How is there any way to pinpoint what Charles Clearson is, exactly?

It’s easy enough to eliminate some things, the creatures that would produce some… obvious physical differences, but Rooke doesn’t allow himself to think it’s that easy. If he’s been alive for longer than anyone knows, so who’s to say he hasn’t fixed that by now, found a way to get rid of it?

It puts him just to about square one, writing down little things here and there with no real direction.

It’s just one thing: he’s alive when he shouldn’t be.

Can’t that be said about half this house, too?

He ends up staring blankly at the laptop for a while, stuck on some page about some European thing that apparently has more eyes than usual. Last time he checked, Charles Clearson had a completely appropriate amount of eyes.

It’s hard to focus on this with Beckett lurking around in the back of his mind. Why did he come back in some form and not his brother? Did his parents and Ilara ever find out, about any of it?

He’s been thinking about them a lot too. There’s no way either of his parents are still alive, but he accepted that a long time ago. There was nothing else to do stuck up in this house by myself with only Madeline occasionally coming up to visit. They're gone, most definitely, but his sister… Ilara could still be alive. She probably still is.

With some hesitation he types her name into the search bar and hits enter. That’s apparently what people do nowadays - register births and deaths and sometimes they end up online, too, in registers that people can check in seconds.

He types in her name, and gets nothing.

Well, not nothing. Random articles with the same last name or same first name, but never both. Things from across the world and right around home. Rooke has no way to know if her name would even still be the same, if she got married, had kids, grandkids…

He wants to know. He thought he might not, but with Beckett long gone he feels like he has to know.

One day, then. One day when it’s in their power, he will.

—

—

—

Kelsea opens Rooke’s door with more than a little trepidation.

The room is mostly dark, lit only by the screen of Dimara’s laptop across his legs. He looks over at her intrusion - her, firstly, and then the box in her arms, and he shuts the laptop with a soft click before she can see what he’s been doing.

“Hey,” she says quietly, taking a seat on the edge of the bed. Neither of them move to turn a light on.

“Is Vance okay?”

“He’s asleep, still.” Kelsea sets the box down between them, and then offers him the cassette player. He wraps one finger around the tangle of headphones dangling from it, letting it curl a few times around his hand.

Distraction techniques are in popular demand, these days. She may just be the number one culprit of them.

“You guys told me everything,” Rooke says slowly. He nudges at the box with his knee, the closest thing to it.

“They did.”

He huffs out a sigh, dragging it closer. He sorts through them until he pulls out twenty-seven. “This is the last one?”

“Yeah.”

He pops that one into the cassette player without so much as blinking and jams both headphones in, pressing the play button before she can even think of interjecting.

“Rooke,” she says. He can definitely still hear it; she didn’t listen to that last long so long ago that she forgets the few seconds it took to actually start. No, this is Rooke ignoring her and what she thinks is best for him. It’s clear she doesn’t have that right in the first place, so trying is futile.

Kelsea shuffles around in front of him until they’re sitting face to face, watching a reaction. He drags both of his knees clear up to his chest. Something like that doesn’t work as well as a shield as it used to, but the effort is at least there. It feels like he’s trying to hide, something he hasn’t done in a long while.

She would have done better to see exactly how long twenty-seven was. Right now she has little to go off of save for his minuscule reactions, the twitch of his jaw or the slight glimmer in his eyes.

This is the brother he thought left him after so many years, involuntarily and unwilling, speaking to him one last time.

Kelsea still has family out there, somewhere in the woods. Despite all their differences they’d still take her back in a heartbeat.

What does he have, anymore?

The silence stretches on for so long that the click of the tape eventually stopping is enough to make her jolt, though she forces herself still for Rooke’s benefit. His face is largely unreadable; she wishes desperately that it was. There is, however, nothing appropriate to say. She almost expected some sort of larger reaction - tears, or screaming, or some sort of lengthy breakdown. Not this.

“Even if my sister is alive, it doesn’t matter,” Rooke says, a distance in his eyes that wasn’t there previously. Kelsea doesn’t have time to make sense of that. “It really… doesn’t matter. Who even knows if she could see my anyway? They all left while I was here, stuck. They’re all gone. I don’t have anything left.”

“You have us,” she murmurs, wishing to earn something for that - a look directly in the eyes, or an admittance of some emotion other than hollowness.

And she gets nothing.

He removes the headphones and hands her back the cassette player; she only takes it so that it doesn’t fall to the ground when he stands up abruptly and heads for the door.

“Rooke,” she says. “Where are you going?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Where are you going?”

He swallows, hand locked around the door. It doesn’t really matter if it’s open, does it?

“To talk to someone.”

He vanishes.

No. It really didn’t matter if it was open.

—

—

—

The issue is, Rooke really doesn’t know where he’s going.

He has an idea, a vague location. He can pop in wherever he wants if he knows the place. They never told him an exact spot; he got no directions, no in-depth details.

He just knows they came here, once and then again. Nadir first, to fix Kelsea, and then all of them.

To fix him.

In the very least, he ends up in the general vicinity. It’s approximately in the middle of nowhere, the roads old and surrounded by forest creeping up to the edges of them. There are no street signs, no blinking lights hanging overhead. It feels deserted. Post-apocalyptic, like Tanis said.

If only they were even close to the same things.

It takes him a while to find the house, and he finds the dead end sign first. With the growth threatening to take it back the house is an awkwardly imposing figure in the midst of it all, falling apart at the seams. The only thing that urges him any closer to it is the car parked around the back, relatively new and apparently in working order.

The old him, whatever that even was, wouldn’t have dared.

What could happen to him now that’s worse than what already did?

Someone’s going to hear him coming. There’s no use winking in and out, not when he doesn’t know the area and could accidentally pop up elsewhere. Dangerous things start occurring once you start to believe you have the whole ghost thing down pat. The front stairs creak underneath him as if they’re about to collapse, and the door’s hinges squeak wildly, barely clinging to any sort of upright state.

He flicks the switch next to the door a few times, but nothing happens. The light in the hall above him doesn’t even flicker.

No one’s come looking, yet.

He inches into the room at his left. There’s some broken furniture and a moth-eaten couch riddled with holes, exposing the springs underneath. The floor is partially eaten through too, some of the floorboards sagging under his almost non-existent weight. It’s not safe to be in here, which means whatever lives here is even less safe. Kelsea’s told him fragments, but even she didn’t know most of it. Judging by the state of the house, they're not very forthcoming.

He makes sure to hug the more intact of the two walls, easing himself over the holes in the floor. It’s not as if anything would happen if he fell through, but he doesn’t want even a split second glance at whatever’s hidden underneath.

A hand grabs him so unexpectedly between the shoulder blades that he nearly does tip off into one of the holes, and is saved, quite tragically, by whoever grabs a hold of him.

The hand leaves his sweater and tangles in his hair, jerking his head back until he’s got a good look at whoever it is, if not a comically angled one. She’s got just enough height on him that he gets a full view of her truly manic smile.

“Hello,” she says cheerfully. “Who the fuck are you?”

He’s not sure how to respond to that. Rooke doesn’t really feel like anyone, right now. He already feels like he’s floating out of body, and he’s sticking with that feeling to avoid feeling terrified. She can’t kill him if he’s already dead.

“You’re one of Blair’s lot, aren’t you?” she asks disdainfully. “God, I hate all of you. Were you the exorcism problem? How does something already dead get possessed?”

He’s not sure how she’s making such curious questions sound like the cold opening to a horror show. It sounds as if as soon as he answers them she’s going to eat him.

“Not sure,” he answers. She lets go of him with a dissatisfied hum and honest to God floats back to the door. He waits, blinking a few times to see if he’s imagining it or not. Unfortunately for him, he isn’t.

“Where’s everyone else?”

“Not here.”

“Why are you here then?”

“I need to talk to someone. I don’t know who.”

“Specific. Shirin’s asleep. Good luck with that one. I wouldn’t wake him up if I were you.”

“You just said I’m dead, remember?” he questions.

“He’s done stranger things to stranger creatures,” she answers with a grin, and then shoves him when she goes by like they’ve known each other for years. “Just trust me.”

Like sew her head back on, apparently. He’s trying not to stare the way people always stare at his own neck; in which they fail and make it obvious anyway. It feels odd to be on the opposite end of it for once.

“Who’s here?” a voice asks from the end of the hall. The door there has opened maybe half a foot, and someone pokes their head through the opening to look at both of them. Rooke sees unnatural blue eyes and not much else.

“Since when do you come out of the basement, troll?” the girl says. She’s gotten far away enough from Rooke that she darts for the half-open door and then kicks through it, clearly connecting with the shin of whoever’s standing on the other side, judging by their little jolt. “He wants to talk to someone, and he’s not talking to me.”

“Fuck off, Isi,” they answer, and go back to peering at Rooke. “Who’s he?”

“Fuck if I know. One of Blair’s. The dead one.”

They blink a few times. “Are you still possessed?”

“No.”

“Oh. I didn’t know if that would actually work.”

“Thanks?” Rooke offers. Isi cackles, and then catches the door, pushing it wide open. She goes pushing past the blockage at the door and disappears down the stairs in a way that he would, vanishing a bit before he can make proper sense of it. He doesn’t know what else to do besides stand there now that Isi’s gone - at least she had interacted with him in a way that was at least vaguely human.

“Parker,” the kid at the door says. He looks about twelve, on a good day, but the eyes are giving him ancient creepy vibes. “Don’t touch anything.”

He steps aside, leaving enough room for Rooke to skirt around him onto the stairs without touching him. He takes the invitation, ignoring the creaking stairs and the noises being produced from the basement, and follows Isi into the depths. Parker closes the door behind the both of them.

Isi’s picked up something by the time either of them get downstairs, a vial full of something off-green and awfully moldy looking. Parker gives her an exasperated look as if the rule was supposed to apply to her as well, though he sits down and goes about to ignoring her as quickly as he looked in the first place.

And now he’s looking at Rooke. Waiting.

Right. He did say he wanted to talk to someone.

“What are the chances that bringing someone back to life actually works?” he asks. Isi slams the vial so hard back down onto the table he expects it so smash into a thousand tiny little pieces.

“Kind of Shirin’s expertise, there.”

“You just told me not to wake him up.”

“I thought you said you didn’t want to talk,” Parker points out, seconds later. Isi scoops someone up from the table and throws it at him; it goes sailing off into the darkness of the basement past his head.

“I don’t.”

Parker sighs. “It’s not that simple. It depends on a lot of things.”

“Like what?”

“How long they’ve been dead, what condition the body’s in, what they are. How long are we talking here? A few hours? A few days?”

“Try forty-five years.”

Parker blinks at him. Isi does too, but she snorts, so the illusion is kind of ruined “Forty-five years,” she cackles again. “Are you sure that possession didn’t fuck with your head?”

It did, but that’s none of her business. Besides, he’d like to think his brain is working at full speed right now, all pistons firing. He knows what he’s doing.

“I hate to admit this, but she’s kind of right,” Parker says. “Forty-five years… you’d be reanimating a skeleton, unless there’s something you’re not mentioning.”

“Is that all you could do?”

“What else would you want someone to do? It’s a pile of bones with no brain, no heart, no internal organs. Even if you someone managed to raise that it would still be completely mindless. If you’re in the market for a pet skeleton, go for it. But you wouldn’t get more than that.”

All of the information they have now, and nothing. Why didn’t he know better? Why was he still delusional enough to hope when he’s never been given any reason to?

Isi throws something, but not at Parker this time. She’s chosen a new target. Whatever it is it bounces square off his chest and lands at his feet. He probably doesn’t want to know what it is with the contents of this room.

“You’re fucked in the head, Beetlejuice,” she observes with a smile.

“He probably doesn’t know what that is.”

“And that’s my problem how?”

Parker’s right - he has no idea what that is, probably never will, and it doesn’t matter. Evidently he doesn’t know anything, or at least not enough to fix any his problems.

So what does it fucking matter?

“I’ll ask Shirin, see if he knows any different,” Parker offers. “But I doubt it.”

“He’ll send you into next week, troll,” Isi says. “Besides, why do you want him bringing anyone else back? If he did it right and made the proper sacrifices maybe his inclination to not fuck up every underage dead teenager within a hundred mile radius would lessen, but I doubt it. But hey, at least Early has a life and leaves the basement.”

“Fuck you,” Parker says again. It sounds like he says those two words an awful lot. “He doesn’t leave either.”

“You know why.”

“Why?” Rooke interrupts. “Why doesn’t he leave?”

Isi considers that. “Too dangerous,” she settles on.

“For him or for anyone around him?”

“Fucked in the head but not stupid, apparently,” she says. “Let’s just say it’s too dangerous for everyone.”

“What is he?”

“Something that technically went extinct a long, long time ago.”

“That wasn’t an answer.”

“Shouldn’t ask such vague questions, then.”

Rooke didn’t think that was vague in the slightest - it seemed pretty straightforward, in fact, but pushing the issue with her doesn’t seem intelligent. Judging by how they all talk about him Shirin will end up figuring out something to do to him if he continues prying.

“Oh, the perils of being Doctor Frankenstein, stuck in the house with all of your monsters,” Isi says, turning her eyes to the ceiling. She’s leaning back in a three-legged chair, dangling precariously over the floor, but he doesn’t think she’d ever fall. It doesn’t seem to be in her nature to let something so easily avoidable happen.

“Says you,” Parker says eventually.

“All three of us down here are dead one way or another,” Isi points out. “Should be all of us.”

Except Rooke isn’t stuck down here, thankfully. He was stuck for too long. There’s no way it’s ever happening again. He’s debating how to leave when Isi lets her chair swivel about to face the stairs.

“Hellboy’s home,” she announces gleefully. Rooke hears a door slam, distantly, and swears the house shakes with it. “I’d scram if I were you, ghostie. He was in an awfully pissy mood when he left earlier.”

He waits, against his better judgement. The footsteps coming through the house get closer and closer until they’re right overhead, and then the door opens from above. He doesn’t have a good enough angle to see up the stairs.

“What the fuck are you two doing down there?” a voice asks. “And who’s down there with you?”

Someone can tell he’s down here, which means they’re like Vance, or Blair, or worse. Probably worse, judging by this house.

Parker turns to him. “I’ll talk to Shirin. Go.”

Rooke nods. Someone starts down the stairs.

He lets himself vanish.


	4. The Proper Sacrifices

For some reason, and he feels as if it will always be this way, Rory still feels safe in the ocean.

He shouldn’t, given what’s happened in it this year. The population that was down there before has been virtually eradicated now - he sees almost nothing except the water, except what’s always lived down there for centuries long before he got here.

But none of that familiar home. No family, no friends.

Just cold, open water.

It’s not the way it used to be. You can’t swim up close to shore without risking something, your life or the safety mentality or something in-between. He stays far out the entire time, in the darkest water, and only allows himself to crawl out so far down the shoreline that it’s nothing but a rocky outcrop, no humans or houses in sight. It’s also conveniently where he left his clothes before he went in.

By the time he gets back to the beach he’s shaken off most of the surrounding chill and his hair is halfway dry. Celia, he recognizes from a distance, is sitting on the end of the dock that he sometimes swears is her second home.

It takes him longer to get there, struggling through the sand, than it usually would. No matter how many times he goes in and out of the water his legs still struggle with the transition as they get reaccustomed to the earth once again.

Celia doesn’t make it any easier on him, either. She lets him walk all the way out to the end of the dock to meet her.

“Just can’t stand me being out here alone, can you?” he asks on approach.

“Not anymore.”

“You think Charles Clearson is a good swimmer?”

“Probably,” she guesses. Knowing him and all of his associated mysteries, she may not be wrong. Rory still thinks the water is safer than the ground, right now, but he can’t take everyone under with him, and he can’t leave them either. They’d do well to leave the city, leave the state, all nine of them. No one’s gotten desperate enough to suggest it.

“Anya was calling you,” she says, holding up his phone. He hadn’t even remembered leaving it at the house.

He takes the phone from her offered hand. There’s one missed call from her, about an hour ago. There’s a text alongside it that says only nothing serious, just checking in. haven’t nearly died again have you? so he sends back a simple not yet and calls it a day.

She does that sometimes, more and more often these days. Checks in with them, that is. Mostly him. She refuses to come around the house just yet for some reason he doesn’t understand, although Rory thinks its more and more likely that she’ll just show up one day. Tavian is trying to convince her, so she says. Tavian also somehow ended up with his number too and sends him increasingly random things from the internet, none of which he actually understands.

Oddly enough, Rory thinks all three of them are friends.

“How are you not freezing right now?” Celia asks, climbing to her feet. She takes his phone, deposits it back in her pocket, and then takes his arm in continued silence to help him navigate back down the beach.

It’s the little things.

“It’s not that cold.”

“It’s freezing,” she insists. “And the water is even worse.”

“You’re forgetting I lived out there three hundred and sixty-five days a year before this,” he reminds her, though it’s not likely she forgot at all. Something like that is hard to shake from memory.

“Doesn’t change the fact that it’s cold.”

To her, maybe. He’s used to it. In fact, the air right now feels colder than the water ever did. Down there it just feels like he’s wearing a second skin, where Celia lost hers.

Perhaps that’s why she’s inched closer, seeking out the warmth he knows he’s still carrying despite it all.

She’s not subtle about it. She probably thinks she is.

By the time they get to the road he’s got most of the coordination back in his legs - Celia switches from his arm to his hand, and walking back to the house they could look like any other old couple. They don’t take the trails in the forest anymore like a pair of normal, sensible humans. They fit the part.

There’s no one out there that has anything directly against them. Maybe that’s why he feels safer than he should.

It doesn’t change what he said to Celia a few nights ago, though. Rarely these days does he worry about himself, not when there are so many others surrounding him that seemingly end up in trouble at the blink of an eye. Blair’s still not doing much at all - he’s walking around, occasionally, but he seems drained at best. Vance has taken to eating meals with them and then locking himself in his room to avoid talking about it. Dimara isn’t talking to Kali, at least not successfully. Not after the blowup.

So who is okay, really? He cried listening to the tapes, but he’s fine. It would be an injustice to everyone else to give another answer. Celia is okay - hovering as much as ever, but fine. He thinks Tanis is doing alright, but she hasn’t listened to them yet, so she has more reason to be.

Rooke definitely isn’t on either of those spectrums. Between him and Vance, Kelsea doesn’t know which way to look, and with Blair effectively down for the count Nadir is talking to them about as much as Vance currently is.

So that’s three, of nine. And Tanis has the tapes by now, so they might be down to two.

Rory doesn’t like being the only pair.

“You okay?” Celia asks. He nods instinctively, because he has to. Another answer isn’t fair.

He’s whole, he was out in the ocean, he’s walking back to the house just fine, past the half unburied grave and wrecked car in the woods. He holds up his arm at the faintest shiver on Celia’s end and she ducks under it, allowing herself to wiggle up against his side.

It’s awkward, as they walk, but it’s fine.

He’s fine.

Like he said - it’s the only answer.

—

—

—

Tanis is never coming out from under her blankets, thank you very much.

She’s never been an overly emotional person. She got that from her mom. Her dad’s side of the family was a weepy, hysterical bunch of people who cried every single time someone died in a movie, side character or not.

But she didn’t. Not never, but rarely.

These stupid things, though, they’re about to get her.

Not at the content. They’re just tapes with usable information. It’s the thought of it all hitting her, the images forming in her head, and the knowledge that those same images Rooke now has in his own brain.

He’s living them, over and over again. It’s his brother. It was his life.

And it’s all over.

Tanis makes sure to get through them only because she knows she owes it to everyone else who’s already done so. Very little of it she actually absorbs, instead choosing to listen to it as if she’s an uninvolved third party and somewhere very far away away from the repercussions of it all. She lays there in her dark cocoon for a while before she slips the headphones back in. She has to listen again, at least to the important ones. This has to get through to her brain.

She hasn’t even pressed play when the door creaks open, and she goes still as can be, hoping the blankets appear flat and undisturbed.

The top left corner lifts up, on the opposite side away from her side. “Mind if I come in?” Nadir asks, only part of her torso visible from Tanis one-eyed vision. She doesn’t even bother lifting the other half of her face out of the pillow, scooting over to make more room. Nadir slips under the blankets and lets them droop back down behind her, plunging both of them into darkness once again.

It’s a good thing Tanis is used to it, even if no one else is. Nadir is good at adapting to it.

“I don’t want to listen to them again,” she mumbles. “I know I should, but—”

“No, you don’t have to. Not if you don’t want to.” Nadir pulls the cassette player away from her, wraps the headphones up, and shoves it between both of their pillows, out of sight.

“I don’t want to, but it doesn’t matter what I want.”

“Of course it does,” Nadir says. “If you don’t want to, don’t. We’ll figure it out. We have enough information.”

“Blair still has those photos he took, right? Of the ID?”

“Yeah.”

“I want to see them.”

“Okay. I’ll grab his phone later. I don’t want to wake him up.”

Nadir can’t wake him up, accidentally or not. She’ll hate herself for it. Everyone is silent and tiptoeing around the house, around him, acting like the quieter they stay the quicker everything will fix itself. Tanis can only hope that’s truly the case even if it seems highly unlikely at this point. They could all do with a break from the world.

She waits, but Nadir never asks why she’s so blatantly curiously about this one specific little thing. It was never supposed to be an issue, but maybe they’ve grown to trust each other too much. Nadir would never think anything suspicious, not about her or her motivations.

Maybe she should start.

“Can I tell you something?” Nadir murmurs. She’s inched closer, leaving little space between them. Even her voice has grown quieter, everything between them carefully enclosed in this little cave of darkness underneath the blankets. Tanis thinks back to how quietly she crept in here in the first place, laying alongside her as if she wanted no one else to know.

There’s no waiting patiently once she thinks that. She slips her legs forward, jabbing Nadir with her toes. “What’s up?”

Nadir folds her face over her hands. “I don’t know.”

“You do though.”

“I totally do,” she groans. “Fuck.”

It’s serious enough that she left Blair’s side long enough to come in here and feel even the faintest urge to tell someone. Nadir rolls over onto her back, and the blankets brush against the tip of her nose when she finally removes her hands from her face.

“I’m pregnant.”

“What?” she asks, blinking rapidly. “That’s a joke, right?”

“Tanis.”

“I’m just asking a question!” she says wildly. She goes to sit up, dislodging some of the blankets, but Nadir drags her back down before she can manage to escape. “You’re not serious.”

“Was that not in plain enough English for you?”

Tanis flops back down and throws an arm over her face, feeling much the same way Nadir just did a few moments back. She dares to look over; Nadir is still hyper-fixated on the blanket half an inch from her eyes as if admitting it to that is easier than looking Tanis in the eyes. It may just be that.

“I can’t tell what you’re feeling right now,” she admits. She feels awful for staring, for some reason. It’s not something that’s easy to pinpoint. “Are you… happy? Sad? Neither?”

“Confused,” Nadir settles on. “Confused and scared.”

“Why are you scared?”

“It just seems like bad timing, doesn’t it?” she asks, waving her hands about. “All of this and a baby do not seem like two things that mix well together.”

“I don’t think a baby mixes well with anything besides sleepless nights,” she points out. “And Blair doesn’t really need to sleep, so…”

Nadir huffs out a laugh, but at the tail end of it she almost sounds as if she’s about to cry. Tanis waits for tears, but none appear. She’s had several hundred years of practice at holding it in, and it appears to be coming in handy now.

“You haven’t told him, have you?”

“I haven’t exactly had a good moment these past few days. Like I said - bad timing.”

She nods, at least filled with some amount of understanding. She rolls onto her back likewise, until they’re pressed together at the shoulders. Nadir sighs, filled with a bone-deep exhaustion that Tanis feels more days than not. It’s unspoken somewhere in the middle that Tanis won’t say anything; this is precisely why Nadir told her in the first place.

Like she said, that trust is there. It won’t go anywhere far.

“Nine becomes ten?” she asks. Nadir snorts.

“God help us.”

“What do you think it’s going to be?”

“I don’t even want to know.”

“If that thing comes out and tries to eat me I am not going to be impressed.”

Nadir folds her hands over her face again, but Tanis is relieved to hear something like a laugh escaping at the edges, even if it sounds slightly strained. She would be more alarmed if there wasn’t some sort of tension associated with it. At this point it’s very well deserved.

She looks over. “We’re gonna be okay, hey? All ten of us.”

“Yeah. We will be.”

She ignores the fear that’s bled into her eyes, the uneasiness to her smile, and squeezes her hand instead. It’s what she told Rooke - it’s nine of them, or nothing. That’s how it was meant to be for this long.

But now it’s ten. And ten’s not as bad of a number as it could be.

—

—

—

Rooke joins him at the table while he’s eating breakfast, as per usual.

Rory doesn’t know when that became a thing, per say, but he seems comfortable with it whether they talk or not so Rory’s really not one to complain. Besides, no one else is down here, and it’s not bad to have the company.

Rooke, too, probably can’t afford to be alone right now. He sits down across the table and immediately folds his forearms over the edge of it, dropping his head down in the middle of them.

He finishes chewing the travesty known as his toast crusts. “You okay?”

Rooke shrugs without responding. Okay then. He probably isn’t, but prying with him usually doesn’t get anywhere, and Rory doesn’t have the heart to even try. Chasing him off will be worse than sitting in silence with him. At least this way Rory feels as if he’s doing something, useful or not. After all, they sat similarly in this kitchen at the beginning of the summer, Rooke trembling with every movement, eyes unwilling to trust anything around him. The way he so easily slumps down into the chair and looks away almost warms his heart.

Almost. It’s not quite enough with what they’re going through now anyway.

Sometimes he wonders if the whole possession thing made Rooke better, in the oddest of ways. He can’t say that aloud because it wouldn’t make sense to anyone else; his brain is working in a very peculiar way whenever he allows himself to venture down this path. Having something stronger than yourself, more confident than yourself, ingrained in your own body… does that do something? Did it infuse with him, just a little bit? The old Rooke, he thinks, would have fallen apart at the first sight of something like this and here he is, still standing. He’s seen bad. Maybe he’s seen the worst. Is this really so bad, after that?

It’s not right to think, because it’s bad. But it’s not his worst, so who is Rory to judge?

“I went somewhere last night,” Rooke murmurs into his arms. Rory shifts a bit closer so he doesn’t have to strain so terribly to hear him.

“Where?” he asks, unable to hide his curiosity. Celia keeps telling him that’s one of his blinding faults, one of his only faults.

He’s beginning to suspect she was more correct than he ever wanted to believe.

“The uh… the house of horrors, so I’ve heard Dimara call it.”

“That’s an odd choice for a travel destination,” he surmises. Rooke nods, or at least he thinks he does. It’s difficult to tell.

For someone who said prying usually gets nowhere, especially with Rooke, Rory sure feels inclined to do just that. The thing is, in the weeks that they’ve been back to normal, he’s never really talked to anyone. Casual conversations, the ones from before, sure. But nothing about what happened to them and what’s still happening. He barely breathes a word of it.

“Why?” he asks finally.

“You know why,” Rooke says. “I wanted to see if they knew what I could do. With the body.”

“Is there anything anyone could do?”

He scoffs. “That’s basically what they said. See, everyone else knew from the get-go that it was pointless but I, for some reason, was stupid and delusional enough to hope for a different outcome.”

“You’re not stupid or delusional,” he insists. “It’s… he’s your brother. Of course you’re going to hope that you could do something. I’d think the same way if it was my family, or any of you - I would never stop asking until someone gave me an answer that worked.”

“But no one’s going to give me one of those.”

“I know,” he says. “Are you willing to accept that?”

Rooke looks up, finally, but his eyes are focused over Rory’s shoulder, out the window. To think he last saw Beckett driving away and then never saw him come back.

It’s what he was suspecting this whole time. For decades Rooke was alone, and then finally left only with his unknowing brother after everyone else took off, searching for greener pastures. And then to live with the thought that Beckett left him stuck here, abandoned, when that’s not what he did at all. If he hadn’t gotten killed Rory thinks Beckett would still be here, old and gray and searching for answers.

It’s not the life he would have deserved, but it’s the one he would have given himself.

“I don’t know,” Rooke says weakly, a small tremble building up progressively in his words. Rory finally sees fit to abandon his plate entirely and rounds the table, switching chairs so that he can sit down next to Rooke and curl an arm around his shoulders. He hesitates a moment before he allows himself to lean into Rory’s side, sniffling slightly.

That’s just another thing that’s been worse since they all got back here. Rooke had finally gotten to a point where he was allowing himself to exist with them, alongside that safety and familiarity, and then he shattered it with his own hands. Those own hands were around Rory’s throat a few months ago.

There are the days when he’ll act like everything is back to normal, and then others where he won’t look anyone in the eye, won’t allow anyone to touch him.

Rory told him once upon a time that the people who had hurt him were gone, and he hates being a liar more than anything else.

That’s what he is, now. He didn’t mean to be.

“Whatever fixing this means, we’re going to,” he murmurs. “Trust in that.”

Maybe Rooke is desperate enough to believe it, because he nods alongside Rory’s reassuring words and goes back to his silence, still curled under Rory’s arm as if he has no intentions of leaving. It’s for the best. Right now they need to stay close, and maybe he needs to stop going to the ocean, if that’s the case.

And Rooke needs to stay put, where they have him safe.

—

—

—

Tanis waits until long after the sun goes down.

Even then she feigns innocence, grabbing a snack from the fridge and then wandering about all three floors of the house to make sure no one’s still lurking, waiting to catch her in the act. Bagel follows her around the top two, tail wagging curiously, but she sees nothing else. 

Her temptation to do a second check just to ensure everyone’s whereabouts are quickly crushed by Bagel’s incessant whining the longer she goes without paying attention to him.

That’s going to wake someone up. She darts for the door, checking for Blair’s phone still tucked safely in her pocket.

She doesn’t even get it open.

“What the hell are you doing?”

She has to slap her own hand over her mouth to avoid yelping, jolting so hard she nearly boots Bagel across the room with one foot. Lucky for him he’s off before she gets the chance, darting across the room for Blair, who apparently is more interesting.

Alright. Touché.

“Fucking hell,” she gasps. “What is wrong with you?”

“A whole multitude of things,” he says easily. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” she says convincingly, or at least she’s hoping it sounds that way. Judging by Blair’s stare, it’s not, but it was worth the try, at least. Maybe not the effort, because she’s never been a very good liar.

“Nothing,” she repeats, letting the word hang in the air once again as if the emphasis will do something.

It doesn’t.

“Don’t you have something else to do?” she asks. “Like be almost dead, or something?”

“You know joking about that doesn’t work anymore.”

That’s true. She did see him dead in a car a few months back, neck cracked sideways. She still sees it, if she’s being honest.

And the joke coming out at all made her feel sick all over.

The hole in his chest is gone. He still looks wrong. Lethargic, maybe. He’s been on and off sleeping since it happened, pumped full of blood when he’s awake and virtually comatose when he’s not. To see him standing here now is jarring - she hasn’t seen him up and walking for days, let alone actively conversing with anyone.

Tanis can’t pretend she doesn’t know why he is now. It’s that damn vampiric sixth sense thing, the one that’s infuriatingly annoying whenever she tries to do something unnoticed as if he knew she was doing it before she even did.

She has a secret now too, but she promised Nadir she wouldn’t tell.

So she has nothing, really.

Awesome.

“Are you going to stand there and stare at me until I tell you?” she asks.

“Yes.”

She can’t very well do that. He looks exhausted, still.

She pulls his phone free from her pocket and opens it, the screen flashing to the image she’d had up for the past hour. “Have you looked into this?”

“In all my spare time?”

“Stop reminding me,” she insists. The hole in his chest is gone, like she said, and she’d rather not keep envisioning it being there anyway. She crosses the room until she can jab the phone right in his face.

“I looked up the address,” she continues, zooming in as far as she can on the ID all the way to the address printed on the bottom as if he can’t see. “It’s out in the middle of nowhere, but it’s only about a half hour away.”

“And?”

She stares at him. He stares back.

“You know you’re not going, right,” he says flatly, giving her an incredulous look. Her feeling stupid under Blair’s gaze, of all people, has to be a new low.

“Someone has to.”

“Not you.”

“Why not me?”

“‘Cause I’m not in the mood to have someone commit suicide by going somewhere they shouldn’t alone. Did you hit your head too hard when we crashed the car?”

“You say that like I was ever asking for approval.”

“You’re not going,” he says again. “Christ alive, the stupid in this house is infectious.”

“And it came from somewhere.”

Blair has nothing for that, no irritated look or snarky reply. He sighs, but it sounds unrelated, and he sits down on the edge of the couch with a thump, not looking her way at all. Maybe he is stupid, but it’s always well-intended, at least.

What is she hoping to gain by going out there alone, except her own death?

He really is making her feel stupid. This is what her life has come to.

“This could be all of the information we need,” she says quietly. “The missing pieces… we could find out what he is. And we could do something.”

“I know. It’s just…”

“Just what?”

“I don’t know,” he says instead, a quick switch. “I’m fucking tired.”

“You should go to sleep.”

That earns a look finally, an almost hilarious do I look stupid? as if he doesn’t all the time, every day since she’s met him. He is, but that’s beyond the point.

“Someone needs to go,” she repeats. “But we can all talk, and decide. Tomorrow, even. If everyone wants to we can go then.”

“You’re not going to go alone.”

“I know.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know,” she reiterates. “I won’t go anywhere alone. Not tonight and not ever, if that makes you feel better. I promise.”

“Bad things happen when people are alone,” he mumbles. And when they’re not, she knows, but she doesn’t say that. More often than now it’s when people are together, these days. 

She watches him navigate his way back to the stairs and then wait for her, expectantly. She has no choice but to go, and she can’t very well break her promise now. She’s not particularly in the mood to die, anyway. It’s a nice feeling for a change.

“Tomorrow,” he says, feet finally touching the basement floor.

“Tomorrow,” she agrees. “Go to sleep, dumbass.”

He ambles back to his room, pausing at the door until she’s tucked herself away safely in her own room. Only then does she hear the door across the hall click shut, and even then she feels as if he’s fighting his own exhaustion, his own almost-death.

He has to make sure she’s staying here, because the last time the two of them were out there, alone…

Well, she’s just trying not to think about it.

Tanis lays down still holding onto his phone and wishes for sleep, wills it, and goes under quicker than she has in years if only to make sure he’s going to sleep, too.

It can wait until tomorrow.

And she might wish it waited longer, too.

—

—

—

There isn’t enough room for everyone around the kitchen table.

It becomes painfully obvious with all nine of them crammed in here shoulder to shoulder, wanting to shift about uneasily but unable to because of the space, or lack thereof, left to each of them.

Rory leans over to the left and nearly treads on someone’s toes. He’s not even sure whose.

“You really wanna do this?” Dimara asks.

“I think she’s got a point,” Blair breaks in before Tanis can even open her mouth. “What better way to find out who the guy is than to go snooping around his house?”

“Have either of you thought about the dangers of this?”

They definitely have. Blair can’t really afford not to, and to be honest Tanis can’t either. They’ve both come too close to death not to.

“You’re asking for it, you know that?” Dimara asks, jabbing a finger at Blair.

“Pretty much always, yeah.”

Rory definitely would not be talking this way if he had just nearly died, but that’s Blair’s thing. He must relish the near-death experiences as if they're birthday gifts. They’re probably the only things that can come close to surprising him after so many hundreds of years alive.

“You don’t have to go,” Dimara offers quietly. She’s looking at Rooke. He had been picking at the edge of the table until now, feigning disinterest at the whole conversation, but his eyes dart up at her words, looking around the group uneasily. Not one of them would care, this he knows. He’s looking for approval anyway.

“I mean, if he’s there…”

“If he’s there we’re not going in at all.”

“Right. So I can come,” he says. “If he’s there we come back.”

“If anyone’s there we come back.”

“But how do we know if anyone is?”

“I’ll go to the damn door,” Nadir says with an easy shrug. Rory’s overwhelmingly glad that someone else offered before he had to.

He really didn’t want to.

“No,” Tanis says, unimpressed.

“You can’t be all gung-ho to go alone whilst refusing to allow me to go to the door. I’ll drive up on the bike and knock. If someone answers whatever, I’ll ask for directions, we’ll come back here and try again. If all’s quiet then we go in.”

“We wouldn’t be able to hear heartbeats from a ways away, would we?” Vance asks.

“Maybe.” Blair shrugs. “I’m not sure whatever the fuck he is even has a heartbeat, though, so I’m not willing to trust it. Or anyone else that could be there, for that matter.”

He’s come to discover that he’s never really actively wished for anyone’s death before, not even the people on the boats that came out into the ocean and ruined everything. People are scared of the unknown, that’s all. They do the only thing they know how to do confidently, what they’ve always done - eradicate.

Rory honest to God wants Charles Clearson dead.

“Is anyone actively opposed?” Dimara asks. Rory thinks everyone is, secretly, but unwilling to voice it. There’s a piece deep down inside them all that thinks this is a bad idea, that knows it more than they know anything else.

She gives them all a good minute, at least, but no one pipes up.

Not that Rory expected anyone to.

“We’ll wait until it gets dark, lay low,” Dimara says. “I’m going to pack up every weapon we have in this house - it comes with us. And for everyone asking I’m going to call Kali and tell her what’s going on in case we need help.”

“You’re thinking to bring an awful lot of help considering we’re going into an empty house,” Celia points out.

He was thinking it. Kali is back-up for fighting purposes, if she shows up or answers at all. The knives and the sword upstairs, down to the crossbow - it all points to a fight.

What about him, specifically, is prepared for that?

Kelsea looks in a similar state, chewing on her lower lip, lost in thought. If something happens, neither of them are going to be able to do anything. They’re not the type.

“You don’t think we’re going to end up fighting someone,” Vance says, a statement more than a question. Of all of the people unwilling to get into it with someone he understands why Vance is last on the list; he probably still has the phantom taste of blood in the back of his throat, the weight of a kill on his shoulders.

“No,” Dimara says. “Of course not.”

She used to be a better liar than this. He used to believe her always, no matter the situation, no matter the circumstances.

He’s starting not to believe her anymore, and it’s awful.

She grabs her phone, levelling them all with a serious look. Rory feels like he’s about to be scolded by his mother just before she leaves, waiting for a lecture that never comes.

Dimara leaves phone in hand, and not one of them moves.

“How do we fight something if we don’t know what it is?” Kelsea asks quietly.

“We don’t,” Blair says, getting up with a screech from his chair. The sudden break in the environment seems to wake everyone up, snapping back to attention and shifting about as if they want to take off, too.

They don’t, or they can’t? Will they even have a chance if they don’t know what he is, what he’s capable of?

“We’re all going to die,” Vance announces.

That Rory believes, he realizes.

All the things to believe in, and he’s chosen that.

—

—

—

“She should’ve been back by now,” Tanis says quietly.

As if whispering will do anything. It’s already so dark that she can barely see anything, that lack of supernatural senses really hitting home.

They already made her climb off the bike and made Nadir go ahead alone, at least two miles up the road in the middle of nowhere. She wasn’t okay with that to begin with.

“It’s only been a few minutes,” Dimara says. “Chill.”

Chill. As if anyone would be chilling if they knew what she did. If Nadir dies, what happens to the baby? Certainly it doesn’t come back too, does it? There’s no way. It’s not even really a baby yet. What would be the damn point?

They all wait some more. No one breathes a word.

“She should’ve been back by now,” Blair says, not two minutes later.

“Thank you,” she insists. “Can someone go check?”

“I’ll go,” Vance announces, practically at the speed of light. He has the door half open before anyone can say anything otherwise; Dimara spins in her seat and slams it shut, nearly crushing his fingers in-between the gap.

“You’re staying here.”

“Why?”

“What are you going to do if something is happening?”

“Fucking kill someone, apparently?” Vance says obviously, a harsh edge to his voice. As if the reminder is at all necessary. “Just let me—”

Tanis hears the harsh clicks of the child locks snapping into place. She waits, almost expectantly, but Vance doesn’t punch a hole in the window and crawl out like she so expects him. He still looks as if he’s about to explode, though. That wouldn’t be fun trapped in the car like this. There wouldn’t be getting the child locks off fast enough.

She considers doing something - she’s already sort of half-sitting on him, anyway, but thinks better of it. He does look just a tad murderous now that his request has been denied, but he wasn’t before. It’s a very odd look to associate with Vance of all people. It only happened once that got brought up, intentionally or not.

They really are all just falling apart. Tanis hasn’t said that aloud yet.

It’s hard, but she knows they are. She hasn’t yet found the courage to raise the alarm on the fact that she’s seen him before, too. Kali never responded to the numerous voicemails Dimara left; Tanis hasn’t asked, but she can tell by the downward turn of her face alone, the uneasy set to her eyes. They’re not getting any back-up.

It really is just the nine of them.

Everyone’s phone buzzes near simultaneously - the message flashing across Tanis’ screen reads no one’s here, just don’t come too close and before she’s even finished with the sentence Dimara has pulled away from the curb.

They pass the spot where Nadir pulled the bike off but even with the knowledge Tanis is unable to see it tucked away in the trees. They leave the car too, hidden away a hundred yards down the road. It’s a just in case Tanis is hoping they won’t need.

The walk to the house isn’t far at all. It’s closer to the road than Tanis could have gaged from the images online and bigger, too, sprawling out and almost breaking into the trees in spots. Said trees are looming above it like massive statues, just waiting to come crashing down through the roof. The whole thing is so dark and foreboding that it looks like it came straight out of some ancient horror film.

“Haunted house,” Celia comments, and then heads around back.

Nadir is waiting at one of the rear windows, slid half-open and unable to go no further. It’s a tight squeeze to slip in but they all make it work, wiggling through to the other side until all nine of them are tucked away inside, in the dark. They’re stuck in one long hallway, unremarkable in everything but length. It stretches away so far that Tanis can hardly see either end.

They end up splitting into two groups, the most sensible of options. Dimara hands her a knife before she goes, a wary look in her eyes. There are enough weapons spread between them that she shouldn’t be the one to be worried about, but she can’t force the issue.

Dimara’s worrying about a lot, clearly. Tanis will do her damnedest not to be extremely high on that priority list.

She leaves after Celia and Rory, and Rooke casts one last glance at Dimara’s back before he hurries after her. Realistically they need to split up the muscle, so that’s good, but clearly Nadir and Blair aren’t going anywhere without the other, and Tanis isn’t so inclined to leave her, either. She goes faster to catch up to them and Vance is following her before she can tell him to go anywhere otherwise, hands still stuffed too tightly in his pockets, jaw tense. Predictably Kelsea is attached to his back, though even she looks doubtful about her own intentions. She might not want to be doing that, is all.

They’re under pretty clear orders here, if they’re orders at all. They’re not to take anything unless it’s absolutely necessary - that’s what their phones and a simple photograph are for. Under no circumstances do they go anywhere alone. They check in every ten minutes, group text and all. If nothing happens before then they meet at the back window in an hour, unless there’s need for it sooner.

There won’t be, is what Tanis is hoping. She’s not very good at being hopeful.

It’s hard to look for anything of importance in this house, too. It’s clearly old, older than almost anything she’s ever been in, but it’s in pristine condition. All of the photographs on the walls are old, black and white, fraying at the edges. None of them are of any people she recognizes.

Besides that, it looks infuriatingly like a normal house. Sparsely decorated, but that’s not a crime. Most of the drawers are barren, every dresser filled with something evenly filed, evenly folded. The kitchen has a very minimal amount of food stored away. It’s so empty that she wants to slam the fridge shut in frustration.

They head into the basement with some reluctance, or at least she does. Kelsea clearly feels the same, so she doesn’t feel too bad. It’s even worse than any of the upper floors - busier, maybe, but small and cramped and filled with nothing useful. It’s more a cellar than a usable living space, shelves attached at the wall. Vance moves a jar an inch out of its spot and the preserved liquid inside barely moves. She moves after him the same way she has and bumps into his back when he stays in place.

Tanis has something queued up, something snarky, but Vance slowly turns around. “Did you hear that?”

She blinks. “Hear what?”

He’s not talking to her. Blair takes a very slow step back to the stairs.

“Is that one of us?” Vance asks. Blair shakes his head, head tilted curiously, eyes focused like she rarely ever sees them. She can hear nothing, find no evidence that anything’s happened where she can’t see it.

Blair holds up two fingers, after a moment. Two? she mouths, and Vance nods. People?

Upstairs he imitates back, taking a few careful steps to Blair’s side. Neither of them make a sound. In his sudden absence Kelsea has grabbed onto her arm in a virtual death grip.

There’s someone in the house with them. Two people. Two people who aren’t them.

That’s not… good.

Blair’s head is steadily turning about, following the movement upstairs, until his eyes are fixated all the way towards where the front of the house is. She opens her phone, but the signal is non-existent. Of course it is, stuck in this cellar. It’s almost predictable.

If there’s two people upstairs, silent, then the others have no idea they’re here unless they’re face to face with them. The two people who could hear them coming are both down here - why did she not make Vance go with them?

She’s stupid, that’s why. So very stupid.

There’s no outburst, no raised alarm, so Tanis has concrete reason to believe that the others have no idea. The people here, whoever they are, either arrived silently or were here the whole time, waiting. Still and quiet and waiting.

If they’re at the front of the house, then she has to go.

Tanis gets through Vance and Blair miraculously unscathed, avoiding all the creaking spots on the stairs she discovered on the way down, and is in the back hallway they arrived in, she’s certain, before whoever’s here has even realized she’s come back upstairs. There’s no sign of anyone on the main floor so she takes the second set to the top floor on the tips of her toes. She can’t hear anything, can’t pinpoint where they could possibly be.

They’re not in any of the first three rooms she ducks into, not in the adjacent hallway.

She turns the corner into what she suspects is the main hall and runs smack dab into someone.

She rears away from their chest, stumbling several feet back, and promptly panics. That’s not a familiar face. The man in question definitely isn’t Charles Clearson but a stranger, a smile so wide on his face that it must hurt.

“Tanis,” he says warmly. “How lovely to see you again.”

She doesn’t know him, but he knows her.

She can’t imagine that’s good.

There’s nothing to recognize in his face; she’s never seen him before in her life. There are fresh scabs grown over his tattooed knuckles, a streak of blood between his thumb and forefinger as if he’s been having fun lately.

There was an odd, uplifted lilt to his voice, though. The tone is indifferent but there’s an edge to it, manic and crazed. Something like that could change any voice.

And it has, before. She recognizes the change from before, how it had manipulated the way he sounded in the most subtle of ways, almost unrecognizable until she knew the truth behind it—

“Tanis!”

That one is recognizable. It’s back to its old self.

Rooke rounds the opposite corner and nearly slams into the connecting wall, wide-eyed. She doesn’t know how it’s possible, but when he straightens the very last of the color in his face drains away until he’s white as a sheet. White like those stereotypical ghosts are.

The man in question turns around to face his arrival. That awful smile is still plastered on his face but somehow growing wider, stretching all the way to the kingdom come until there’s no room for it left on his face.

“Oh, Rooke,” he says. “We meet again. Did you miss me?”

Suddenly Tanis knows exactly who they’re dealing with, terrifying clarity overcoming her.

She knows what she said, and she was right.

This isn’t good at all.

—

—

—

Rory’s too slow to catch him.

It’s hard when Rooke literally disappears. Dimara peels off in the opposite direction, swearing, but there’s no sign of him.

He heard something, though, voices where there shouldn’t have been, a conversation too loud for what was going on.

He finds Rooke and he finds something else, too.

Just by grabbing his arm alone Rory can feel the fear in him; he’s shaking like a leaf all the way down to his toes, leaning back as if a few spare inches will really do him any good.

“No,” Rooke says quietly. “No, no, no no no—”

“Oh, take it easy, why don’t you?” the man asks. “It’s a firm yes. It was adorable, really, you thinking I’d all vanish far, far away. You thought you’d get me out of him and that would be the end of it, when all it took was a brand new body and bam. Invasion of the body snatchers round two.”

“Oh shit,” he whispers. So that’s what this is, then. He doesn’t want it to make any sense, but it does, in a tragic sort of way.

Everything these days is really, awfully tragic.

He grabs Rooke’s arm and swivels about until he’s holding him behind his back. He doesn’t want to be the person that has to do that, but there’s no other option.

There’s no one else. Whoever is downstairs might be a bigger problem than he imagined.

“C’mon, Rory, ease up. What do you think I’m going to do to him? He’s already dead.”

“I think you did enough already.”

“Yeah, you’re right, I did,” he answers with a laugh. “But he’ll get over it, hey? It wasn’t that bad.”

“Wasn’t that fucking bad,” Tanis snaps, and he whirls on her now. Rory really ought to have went over there and gotten her instead - she’s the mouthier one, more inclined to start something out of a mix of sheer terror and anger. Rooke’s not going anywhere, that much is clear.

“You’re correct, it wasn’t,” he says. “You were much worse. I’d put that hand down, if I were you.”

“What, don’t want a repeat of last time?”

“Not at all,” he hisses. “And you’d best keep it away from that knife in your back pocket, too. You’re gonna lose it if you try.”

There’s a scream from downstairs, high-pitched and shrill, like the call of a bird. It’s not anyone he knows. Whoever’s chosen to join him, then. There’s breaking glass and the crashing of furniture all around.

He senses movement from the corner of his eye and holds his hand out without checking to see who it could possibly be, glancing over only when the noise distracts them all enough for a minute. Dimara pauses, sword in one hand and crossbow dangling loosely from the other. He shakes his head. A crossbow won’t kill him for good, or the spirit itself, and she won’t be quick enough to get here with something close range.

“We need Blair, or something,” Rooke says in a rush. He’s thinking the same thing. “He’s the only one fast enough to—”

“Blair snapping his neck won’t kill the actual thing. The body for sure, but not the spirit. What then?”

“Does it matter? He’s out of commission. We get the hell out of here.”

“You’re wounding me, Rooke,” he announces, voice booming over the hallway. “Out of commission? Really? That’s not necessary. Besides, what about what’s happening downstairs?”

There’s no telling what’s happening downstairs. Dimara’s eyes flick away, back the way she came, but it’s clear she won’t leave. They should have enough manpower down there to deal with it, right? They have to.

The man takes a step closer, and then another. Rory shoves Rooke back a few paces and then follows.

“Gremory!” he shouts, smiling. “How are you doing down there?”

The screaming comes to an abrupt halt and is quickly replaced by a scathing cackle that goes on and on and on, fading out and then coming back just as quickly. It could almost be a song if it wasn’t so horribly twisted.

“Sounds like she’s doing good,” he comments. “Do you want to take bets on yours? Or should we dare to wonder how you’re going to do against him?”

“Him?”

“Are you playing stupid, or not?” he asks. “Him.”

“Charles Clearson?” Rooke asks.

“Clearson,” he emphasizes. “Is that what he was going by, back then? You people and your fucking names.”

“Are you with him?”

“With him is such an ugly term. I’m here, he’s here. We’re all here. I would say it’s more of a… partnership. A beneficial grouping all looking for a common goal. And you see, you might have been the last one he would have killed, kiddo, save for your brother, but then you didn’t exactly go away. Now it’s just going to get messy for everyone here. He never wanted that. And quit looking at me like that, would you? I’ve been here the whole time, remember? So has he. And he’s known you were still ghosting around since July, when I told him.”

Rooke makes one hell of an ugly noise, something that almost turns into a sob before he squashes it back down his own throat. Rory shoves them back even further and chances one last glance at Dimara. She nods. He pushes back another step.

It urges the man forward. He doesn’t even look that old. There would be something playfully innocent to his eyes if they weren’t all-consumed by evil.

“I told you to leave, remember?” he asks. “I told you all to run far away. I like you guys, really. I wouldn’t have minded sparing you from the apocalypse, but you stayed. You have no idea what that means. You’re not ready for the invasion, for what happened in California to happen here. You’re not ready for any of it.”

He doesn’t know what that means, but it’s for the best. He has enough to think about, and it doesn’t sound good anyway. Rory was never really prepared for any of this because he never thought he’d have two feet on solid ground, never have two feet at all. 

He was not supposed to be here, and now there’s no leaving.

Rory allows himself to take two more steps back, until Rooke nearly hits the wall. There’s nowhere else to go except forward and the man is still advancing, creeping closer with every inch of room he gains.

“This is going to be fun,” he starts. The smile grows again.

An arrow tears through his neck and out the other side in a splatter of blood. Rory flinches despite his preparation but Rooke is even worse, nearly tearing himself free from Rory’s hands despite the fierce grip he has.

“Let’s go, now,” Dimara insists.

“But—”

“Now. Before he starts fucking body hopping.”

“Oh, God,” Rooke chokes. “If he comes back, I’m—”

“No, go,” Dimara says. “I mean it, you go. Back to the car, or the house, wherever you feel safest, but go.”

“You guys can’t stay here.”

“We’re not. Rooke, I’m serious, go.”

He disappears like a puff of smoke, leaving Rory’s hands empty and much colder than they were before. Dimara grabs his arm and then Tanis’, who’s stepped over the body but not before kicking it, savagely. She gets dragged away - they both do, before she can do it again.

Dimara pulls them downstairs into what can only be described as an absolute ruin. His feet touch the ground, and both the screaming and the laughing stop again. There’s no reappearance of it though. He doesn’t think he can stand to hear any more of it.

“Hey! Celia shouts. There’s blood streaked up her arms, but she looks relatively unharmed. He starts breathing easier for it.

“Please tell me she’s—”

“Dead-dead,” Celia says, panting. “She fucking broke everything in sight, but they pinned her, and I got her in the back.”

She raises the silver-white of the angel blade, caked in blood, and she looks a little manic herself with that smile but he can take that.

“Okay, out,” Dimara insists.

“She’s dead.”

“She is, but the one upstairs isn’t. Out before he gets going.”

The living room, or what’s left of it, is in tatters. There’s not a fully intact piece of furniture in sight. The front door is completely broken off and in three wide pieces across the front yard. In the middle of said pieces is the body, face down in the grass. She’s smaller than he would have imagined, making the hole in her back seem larger with the blood steadily soaking through her shit.

Tanis gives that one a kick, too, but the savagery has been left behind upstairs, he can tell, with the one who hurt them the most.

“She was fucking wily,” Blair says. “Sorry it took us so long, we would’ve come—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Dimara says. “Car. Now.”

She says it, and then stops dead in the middle of the yard, a single plank of wood underneath her left foot just as Kelsea drops the piece she had been apparently wielding like a club. There’s not a drop of blood on it at all - there’s a splatter of it over Vance’s shirt and Nadir’s face, but everyone looks unscathed save for that.

“Is Rooke—”

“Gone,” Tanis answers. “Thank God.”

“Thank God,” Dimara echoes, voice icy. Rory’s still waiting for her to move, to listen to her own advice. “Thank God for that, hey?”

She does move, then. She turns around.

She turns around, and the knife in her hand nearly catches him in the eye.

It misses, cutting across his brow-bone and up into the temple. Blood splashes into his eyes, hot and sticky, rendering him blind. Someone shouts something as he goes stumbling back then trips right onto the ground, over the legs of the girl they just killed. That single shout dissolves into several more the second he hits the ground, followed by the slick swing of the knife.

Someone’s laughing again.

It’s not her. Hands grab onto his shoulders and he jerks away, unable to see, the panic turning every rational thought in his brain to mush.

“It’s me!” Celia shouts. He barely hears her over the laughing. “Jesus, fuck, you can’t kill her, why the fuck did it—”

Rory loses the rest of the sentence. Dimara was human. Halfway, anyway. The only one here close to it.

She put an arrow through his neck, and he chose a target. Or maybe he knew from the get-go.

It feels like he did.

Celia lunges away from him, swearing. If Celia’s leaving it’s bad. He swipes a hand through the blood streaming into his eyes and sees several blurry figures, nothing distinct, but he knows Dimara with a knife when he sees it.

Except it’s not Dimara. It looks like her, but even the laugh is off. Totally wrong.

It’s all wrong.

He searches for some purchase to push himself up and blood drips into his mouth over his top lip, making his stomach roll. Someone gets so close they nearly step over him, and then they’re gone again. Finally hands grab him again, and he stays put only because if Dimara had him someone would be doing something. They would have to.

Someone’s shouting her name. The laughing stops. It’s like a broken record. All night, it starts and it stops.

But it never stops in his head.

“Oh, shit,” someone says. He can’t even recognize who, and he doesn’t know who has him, either. They pull him several feet away until there’s nothing but grass, and then drop him there. “Oh, fuck, don’t let her—”

There’s the knife again, but the noise is fainter. Softer. There’s something almost like a drawn out breath, weak. Weaker by the second.

There’s a thud. It sounds like something hitting the ground.

Someone starts screaming. It’s not a manic, awful scream from before. It’s gut-wrenching, an agonized wail. The noise itself is one of the worst things he’s ever heard and it’s not stopping. Why won’t it fucking stop?

Light cuts through his vision, twin lights, blinding in their opacity. Anything else wouldn’t be able to cut through the blood, but it’s the light and the size and the distinct memory of the car and seeing it almost semi-regularly. He wasn’t afraid of it anymore.

That’s Kali’s car. Kali’s here?

The car stops before it gets anywhere close, and someone gets out. It has to be her. Of course she would be, because Dimara called her, and despite whatever happened Dimara needs her, now more than ever.

But Kali doesn’t move. He can’t make out any details of her face, but she doesn’t move.

It takes him too long to realize that the screaming has stopped, and now someone is sobbing in its place, filling the silence that would have taken over otherwise. It sounds like more than one person. It’s a whole symphony of dreadful noise, twisting at his heart, worming down into his stomach. He claws through the blood over his eyes, folding three fingers over the gash over his temple. He needs to be able to see - something’s wrong behind him, where he was left, and he doesn’t know what. Can’t see what.

He clears some of it, finally. It’s still dripping between his fingers, finding the cracks and weaknesses that he’s left exposed, but it’s good enough.

He turns around.

He turns around, and wishes he never had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next part will be up before Christmas, never fear. Until then.


End file.
